Behind us lay a week of tremor and unrest unknown since the days, exactly forty-four years previous, preceding the Franco-Prussian War. The money universe, most susceptible and prescient of all worlds, rocked with nervous alarm. Its instinctive apprehension of imminent crisis was fanned into panic on the night of July 23, when word came that Austria had presented Serbia an ultimatum with a time limit of forty-eight hours. My own information of Vienna’s crucial step was prompt and unequivocal. It was on its way to London and New York before seven o’clock Thursday evening, Berlin time. I was gratified to learn at the _Daily Mail_ office in London three weeks later that I had given England her first news of the match which had at last been applied to the European powder barrel. It was five or six hours later before general announcement of the Austrian ultimatum arrived in Fleet Street. I was not surprised to learn that my startling telegram had aroused no little skepticism. During many days preceding it was the despair of the Berlin correspondents of British newspapers that they seemed utterly unable to impress their home publics with the fast-gathering gravity of the European situation. London was no less nonchalant than Paris and St. Petersburg. England was immersed to the exclusion of everything else in the throes of the Irish-Ulster crisis. Mr. Redmond and Sir Edward Carson loomed immeasurably bigger on the horizon than all Austria and Serbia put together. In the boulevards, cafés and government-offices of Paris the salacious details of the Caillaux trial absorbed all thought. In St. Petersburg one hundred sixty thousand working men threatened an upheaval which bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the revolutionary conditions of 1905. But it was the invincible indifference of London, as it seemed in Berlin, which appealed to us most. The newspapers of July 21, 22 and 23 came in and indicated that for England Ulster had become Europe. There was obviously little space for, and less interest in, dispatches from Berlin or Vienna describing the "undisguised concern" prevalent in those capitals. On July 21 I quoted "high diplomatic authority" for the statement that the pistol would be at Serbia’s breast before the end of the week. But London remained impervious. More than one of my British colleagues, equally unsuccessful in stirring the emotions of his people, threw up his hands in resignation, muttering things about "British complacency," which would have come with poor grace from a mere American.