We have only to read a few pages of any German book on England to see that the other party to the dispute is confronted with exactly the same difficulty. We are amazed, and perhaps not altogether chagrined, to discover that, to German eyes, British policy appears to be a thing of the most rigorous consistency. It is deliberate, far-sighted, and ruthless. It is pursued with constancy from decade to decade--nay from century to century--never faltering, never retreating, but always going forward under Whig and Tory, Liberal and Conservative alike, to the same goal. And we of course know, if we know anything, that this picture, though very flattering to our political instinct, is untrue. {80} If Englishmen know anything at all, they know that the foreign policy of this country during the last fifty years--under Lord Beaconsfield, and Mr. Gladstone, Lord Salisbury, and Mr. Asquith--has been at times a series of the most eccentric wobbles and plunges, like a kite which is drawn at the wrong angle to the wind. Nay, even as regards our participation in this very War--which in the German White Book is asserted to have been preconceived and undertaken by us with a craft and coolness worthy of Machiavelli himself--we can see from our own White Paper that the final decision wavered this way and the other, from day to day during the critical week, neither the Cabinet nor public opinion being clear and unanimous as to the course which ought to be pursued. Vacillation in national policy usually appears to hostile observers in the light of perfidy. And it must be admitted that there is good excuse for the mistake, seeing that weakness in such high matters is quite as likely to injure everybody concerned as wickedness itself. Assuredly no sensible person who was required to make a defence of British foreign policy, either during the century which has passed since the battle of Waterloo, or in the much shorter period since the death of Queen Victoria, would ever dream of doing so on the ground that its guiding principles have been consistency and singleness of purpose. These, indeed, are almost the last virtues he would think of claiming for it. And yet these are the very qualities which foreign nations are inclined to attribute to British statesmen, by way of praise or blame. Our failures are apt to be overlooked by outside {81} observers; our successes on the other hand are plain and memorable. Other nations assume that because we have happened to achieve some particular result, we must therefore have deliberately and patiently set out to achieve it. Much more often this result has been due either to pure good luck or else to some happy inspiration of the moment.