"When I spoke I already had certain indications, but no absolute proof upon which to base a public accusation, that Belgium long before had abandoned its neutrality in its relations with England. Nevertheless, I took Germany's responsibilities toward the neutral State so seriously that I spoke frankly of the wrong committed by Germany. "What was the British attitude on the same question?" continued the Chancellor. "The day before my conversation with Ambassador Goschen, Sir Edward Grey had delivered his well-known speech in Parliament, in which, while he had not stated expressly that England would take part in the war, he had left the matter in little doubt. "One needs only to read this speech through carefully to learn the reason for England's intervention in the war. Amid all his beautiful phrases about England's honor and England's obligations we find it over and over again expressed that England's interests--its own interests--call for participation in the war, for it is not in England's interests that a victorious and therefore stronger Germany should emerge from the war. "This old principle of England policy--to take as the sole criterion of its actions its private interests regardless of right, reason, or considerations of humanity--is expressed in that speech of Gladstone's in 1870 on Belgian neutrality, from which Sir Edward quoted. "Mr. Gladstone then declared that he was unable to subscribe to the doctrine that the simple fact of the existence of a guarantee is binding on every party thereto, irrespective altogether of the particular position in which it may find itself at a time when the occasion for action on the guarantee arrives; and he referred to such English statesmen as Aberdeen and Palmerston as supporters of his views. "England drew the sword," continued the Chancellor, "only because it believed its own interests demanded it. Just for Belgian neutrality it would never have entered the war. "That is what I meant when I told Sir Edward Goschen in that last interview, when we sat down to talk the matter over privately as man to man, that among the reasons which had impelled England to go into the war the Belgian neutrality treaty had for her only the value of a scrap of paper. "I may have been a bit excited and aroused," said the Chancellor. "Who would not have been at seeing the hopes and the work of the whole period of my Chancellorship going for nought? I recalled to the Ambassador my efforts for years to bring about an understanding between England and Germany; an understanding which, I reminded him, would have made a general European war impossible, and which absolutely would have guaranteed the peace of Europe. "Such an understanding," the Chancellor interjected parenthetically, "would have formed the basis on which we could have approached the United States as a third partner; but England had not taken up this plan, and through its entry into the war had destroyed forever the hope of its fulfillment.