whatever hands framed the most favourable alliance with Ireland. But whatever the wisdom or the folly of such expectations, there is no doubt that the Separatists looked to Germany not to annex but to free Ireland. They did not desire that Germany should take Ireland from England; but that Germany should declare Ireland to be an independent sovereign State. Nothing less than this could have satisfied their aspirations. For Germany to have offered less would not have secured their assistance; if Germany had annexed Ireland they would have welcomed a deliverer from Germany as eagerly as a deliverer was looked for them from the domination of England. But in the actual circumstances that accompanied the outbreak of war in 1914 there was no disposition to take sides with Germany on the merits, or to stake everything upon the success of an understanding with Germany. It is true that the official statement of the English case for the declaration of war was received with a certain degree of quiet scepticism. The commercial rivalry of the two empires, the prophecies of a coming war that had been openly made for years, the _Entente Cordiale_ with the French Republic, of the real meaning of which France at least made no secret, had been too well known and had been too openly and too long canvassed for the violation of Belgian neutrality by Germany to receive the importance which was attributed to it or to be regarded as much more than a blunder adroitly utilized. There was not so much sympathy with Germany as a want of sympathy with England: there was not so much a lack of sympathy with Belgium as a distrust of the appeals which were insistently made to that feeling.