Next to the omission of all reference to what Sir Edward Grey called Germany’s "infamous proposal" for the purchase of British neutrality--a pledge not to despoil France of European territory if England would stand with folded arms while Germany violated Belgium and ravished the French Colonial Empire--the striking feature of the Berlin White Paper was the admission of German-Austrian complicity in the humiliation of Serbia. The Foreign Office, as I have previously explained, had zealously affirmed Germany’s entire detachment from Austria’s programme for avenging Serajevo. What did the White Paper now tell us? That "Austria had to admit that it would not be consistent either with the dignity or the self-preservation of the Monarchy to look on longer at the operations on the other side of the border without taking action.... _We were able to assure our ally most heartily of our agreement with her view of the situation, and to assure her that any action she might consider it necessary to take in order to put an end to the movement in Servia directed against the existence of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy would receive our approval_. We were fully aware, in this connection, that warlike moves on the part of Austria-Hungary against Servia would bring Russia into the question, and might draw us into a war in accordance with our duties as an ally." The historic and ineffaceable fact is that Austria--wabbly, invertebrate Austria, which would even to-day, but for Germany, lay prostrate and vanquished--never made a solitary move in the whole plot to coerce Serbia without the full concurrence of the big brother at Berlin. It would be an insult to the intelligence of German diplomacy, stupid as it is, to imagine that the Kaiser’s Government sat mute, unconsulted and nonchalant, while Austria worked out a scheme certain, as the Germans themselves admit in their White Paper, to plunge Europe into war. It was my privilege on arriving in the United States on August 22, to furnish the _New York Times_ with the first copy of the German White Paper to reach the American public. In preparing a prefatory note to accompany the verbatim translation published in next day’s paper, I selected the paragraph above quoted as _primâ-facie_ evidence that the German claim of non-collusion with Austria is subterfuge--to give it the longer and less unparliamentary term.