One wonders if the angels in heaven will ever forgive his silence at a time when the famished children of Austria, many of them born with no bones, were dying like flies at the shrivelled breasts of their starving mothers. One wonders if the historian sixty years hence will be able to forgive him his rebuff to the first genuine democratic movement in Germany during the war. His responsibility to God and to man is enormous beyond reckoning. Only the future can decide his place here and hereafter. It is a moral universe, and, sooner or later, the judgments of God manifest themselves to the eyes of men. One seems to see in him an illustrious example both of the value and perils of emotionalism. What power in the world is greater, controlled by moral principle? What power so dangerous, when moral earnestness ceases to inspire the feelings? Before the war he did much to quicken the social conscience throughout the world; at the outbreak of war he was the very voice of moral indignation; and during the war he was the spirit of victory; for all this, great is our debt to him. But he took upon his shoulders a responsibility which was nothing less than the future of civilization, and here he trusted not to vision and conscience but to compromise, makeshift, patches, and the future of civilization is still dark indeed. This I hope may be said on his behalf when he stands at the bar of history, that the cause of his failure to serve the world as he might have done, as Gladstone surely would have done, was due rather to a vulgarity of mind for which he was not wholly responsible than to any deliberate choice of a cynical partnership with the powers of darkness. LORD CARNOCK LORD CARNOCK, 1ST BARON (ARTHUR NICOLSON, 11TH BART.) Born, 1849. Educ.: Rugby and Oxford; in Foreign Office, 1870-74; Secretary to Earl Granville, 1872-74; Embassy at Berlin, 1874-76; at Pekin, 1876-78; Charge, Athens, 1884-85; Teheran, 1885-88; Consul-General, Budapest, 1888-93; Embassy, Constantinople, 1894; Minister, Morocco, 1895-1904; Ambassador, Madrid, 1904-5; Ambassador, Russia, 1905-10; Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, 1910-16. Author of the _History of the German Constitution_, 1873. [Illustration: LORD CARNOCK] CHAPTER II LORD CARNOCK _"Usually the greatest boasters are the smallest workers. The deep rivers pay a larger tribute to the sea than shallow brooks, and yet empty themselves with less noise."_--SECKER. One evening in London I mentioned to a man well versed in foreign affairs that I was that night meeting Lord Carnock at dinner. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "the man who made the war."