“England: ‘So long as I lead the figure, and you renounce a _pas seul_.’” Unfortunately the allurements of a _pas seul_ were too strong to be anywhere resisted. Prices grew stiffer and stiffer, armies melted away when the time for action neared. Britain, always victorious at sea, paid out large sums for small returns on land. Her position was briefly summed up by Sir Hugh Elliot--more brilliant and less astute than his brother--at the hostile Court of Prussia. Frederick the Great, overhearing the pious ejaculation with which the Englishman greeted the arrival of a satisfactory dispatch from Sir Eyre Coote, said to him acidly: “I was not aware that God was also one of your allies.” “The only one, Sire, whom we do not finance,” was the lightning retort. One more circumstance deserves to be noted as both familiar and consolatory. Napoleon’s most formidable purpose was to empty England’s purse by waging a commercial war. When he forbade her exports to the countries he fancied he controlled, he was promised implicit obedience. In March, 1801, Lord Minto wrote serenely to Lord Grenville: “The trade of England and the necessities of the Continent will find each other out in defiance of prohibitions. Not one of the confederates will be true to the gang, and I have little doubt of our trade penetrating into France itself, and thriving in Paris.”--Which it did. The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times. The despairing tone of contemporary writers would seem to indicate that the allied nations that fought and won the Great War have fallen from some high pinnacle they never reached to an abysmal depth they have never sounded. When Dean Inge recorded in “The Contemporary Review” his personal conviction that the war had been “a ghastly and unnecessary blunder, which need not have happened, and ought not to have happened,” this casual statement was taken up and repeated on both sides of the Atlantic, after the exasperating fashion in which a Greek chorus takes up and repeats in strophe and antistrophe the most depressing sentiment of the play. And to what purpose? Did any sane man ever doubt that Austria’s brutal ultimatum to Serbia was a ghastly and unnecessary blunder? Did any sane man ever doubt that Germany’s invasion of Belgium was a ghastly and unnecessary blunder? But if Dean Inge or his sympathizers knew of any argument, save that of arms, by which the Central Powers could have been convinced that they were blundering, and persuaded to retrieve their blunder, so that what ought not to have happened need not have happened, it is a pity that this enlightenment was not vouchsafed to an imperilled world.