None the less the judgment of the Kaiser and his Ministers was not only bad, but inexcusably bad. We expect more from statesmen than that they should arrive at logical conclusions. Logic in such cases is nothing; all that matters is to be right; but unless instinct rules and reason serves, right judgment will rarely be arrived at in such matters as these. If a man cannot feel as well as reason, if he cannot gauge the forces which are at work among the nations by some kind of second-sight, he has no title to set up his bills as a statesman. It is incredible that Lincoln, Cavour, or Bismarck would ever have blundered into such a war as this, under the delusion that Britain could remain neutral even if she would. Nor would any of these three have been so far out in his reckoning as to believe, that the immediate effect of such a war, if Britain joined in it, would be the disruption of her empire. They might have calculated that in the event of the war being prolonged and disastrous to England, disintegration would in the end come about; but without stopping to reason the matter out, they would have known by instinct, that the first effect produced by such a war would be a consolidation and knitting together of the loose Imperial fabric, and a suspension, or at least a diminution, of internal differences. [1] British public opinion in regard to that war was divided roughly according to party lines, the Conservatives favouring France on sentimental grounds, the Liberals favouring Germany as a highly-educated, peace-loving people who had been wantonly attacked. {69} CHAPTER VII INTERNATIONAL ILL-WILL In the foregoing pages an attempt has been made to consider the series of events which immediately preceded the recent outbreak of war. But the most complete account of moves and counter-moves, and of all the pretexts, arguments, demands, and appeals which were put forward by the various governments concerned, with the object of forcing on, justifying, circumscribing, or preventing the present struggle, can never give us the true explanation of why it occurred. For this we must look much further back than Midsummer last, and at other things besides the correspondence between Foreign Ministers and Ambassadors. Nobody in his senses believes that Europe is at present in a convulsion because the heir-presumptive to the throne of Austria was murdered at Serajevo on the 28th of June. This event was tragic and deplorable, but it was merely a spark--one of that cloud of sparks which is always issuing from the chimney-stack of the European furnace. This one by ill-luck happened to fall upon a heap of combustibles, and set it in a blaze. Great events, as the Greeks discovered several thousand years ago, do not spring from small causes, {70} though more often than not they have some trivial beginning. How came it that so much inflammable material was lying ready to catch fire?