But that dismissal into space as a mere scrap of paper of the treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium, which bore the name of Germany, was to Germany herself a worse disaster than the loss of a pitched battle. It was a form of suicide. It destroyed her public credit; it dismissed her from the realm of good faith. When, at the end of the war, the representatives of the nations now in conflict sit around some table in London or in Paris to draw up terms of peace, the ghost of this scrap of paper will cost Germany much, for she has stripped herself of all title to be trusted. Now, a blunder so unspeakably stupid on the part of men so able shows that at that moment, and in that act, the brains of the men who were the representatives of Germany were in some curious state of paralysis. But this gigantic blunder is to this day being pursued by Germany with explanations and justifications which, as examples of unreason, suggest nothing so much as the logic employed in ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ The German Chancellor himself some time afterwards asked the world to believe that what he meant was that ‘a scrap of paper’ represented the _British_ idea of the value of a treaty, while Germany ‘took her responsibility towards neutral States seriously.’ And Bethmann-Hollweg offered this explanation after Germany had actually violated Belgian neutrality, and Great Britain had gone to war to maintain it! The German Chancellor offered, in the very same speech, yet another explanation in open quarrel with the explanation just given. At the time he described the treaty as ‘a scrap of paper,’ he had ‘reason to believe,’ he told the Reichstag, that the Belgians themselves had destroyed their own neutrality by a convention they had made with England for the introduction of British troops; but as he lacked formal proof of the circumstance, he did not mention it at the time. Since then they had captured Brussels, and found, in the archives there, the actual text of the convention with England, by which Belgium violated its own neutrality. As a matter of fact, the guilty document which the German Chancellor quoted was not a ‘convention’ at all, but notes of a ‘conversation’ betwixt the British military attaché and Major-General Ducalme, a Belgian officer. It was an academic discussion of what might be done ‘after Germany had entered Belgian territory’; and it was endorsed as ‘not binding’ on either of the two nations. And the German Chancellor quotes this discussion of what might be done to _guard_ its neutrality against German attack as a _surrender_ of its neutrality. This is very much as though a burglar, caught in the act of plundering a house, claimed that his burglary was justifiable, as he found—_after_ he had broken into the house—that its owner had a revolver under his pillow.