Who started it? Who is to blame? The courts decide the point when there is a quarrel between Smith and Jones; and it is the ethics of simple justice that no friend of Smith or Jones should act as judge. When the quarrel is between nations, the neutral world turns to the diplomatic correspondence which preceded the breaking-off of relations; and only one who is a neutral can hope to weigh impartially the evidence on both sides. For war is the highest degree of partisanship. Every one engaged is a special pleader. I, too, have read the White and Blue and Yellow and Green Papers. Others have analysed them in detail; I shall not attempt it. One learned less from their dignified phraseology than from the human motives that he read between the lines. Each was aiming to make out the best case for its own side; aiming to put the heart of justice into the blows of its arms. Obviously, the diplomatist is an attorney for a client. Incidentally, the whole training of his profession is to try to prevent war. He does try to prevent it; so does every right-minded man. It is a horror and a scourge, to be avoided as you would avoid leprosy. When it does come, the diplomatist’s business is to place all the blame for it with the enemy. One must go many years back of the dates of the State papers to find the cause of the Great War. He must go into the hearts of the people who are fighting, into their aims and ambitions, which diplomatists make plausible according to international law. More illumining than the pamphlets embracing an exchange of despatches was the remark of a practical German: “Von Bethmann-Hollweg made a slip when he talked of a treaty as a scrap of paper and about hacking his way through. That had a bad effect.” Equally pointed was the remark of a practical Briton: “It was a good thing that the Germans violated the neutrality of Belgium; otherwise, we might not have gone in, which would have been fatal for us. If Germany had crushed France and kept the Channel ports, the next step would have been a war in which we should have had to deal with her single-handed.” I would rather catch the drift of a nation’s purpose from the talk of statesmen in the lobby or in the club than from their official pronouncements. Von Bethmann-Hollweg had said in public what was universally accepted in private. He had let the cat out of the bag. England’s desire to preserve the neutrality of Belgium was not altogether ethical. If Belgium’s coast had been on the Adriatic rather than on the British Channel, her wrongs would not have had the support of British arms.