But one cannot do a number of things, each weighted with a similar tendency, without one's whole conduct and fate being determined in the direction to which those actions tend. To preserve one's legal or technical independence is not enough. In this specific case, for instance, the naval arrangement proved an exceedingly weighty thing. France could say:
"Relying on your explicit, though not expressed, support of myself and Russia, I guarded your trade routes in the Mediterranean and left my northern coasts undefended. Here is war about to break out with those northern coasts of mine bare against the overwhelming attack from the German fleet, and with nothing wherewith I can guard it; and that nakedness is entirely due to having trusted you. You may not have a legal obligation, but the moral one is not to be shirked."
At any rate, I insist upon the tendency of all these various diplomatic acts, because it has been they that might have dragged the most reluctant Government into this conflict, and it was they which, in combination with the cardinal policy of preventing maritime rivalry in the narrow seas, decided the present policy of this country.
3. But, as I have said, there was a third cause, much vaguer and, until war actually broke out, of little effect. Though there had existed for thirty years from 1880 until after the beginning of the new century such strong bonds of sympathy between Great Britain and North Germany--bonds riveted by Court influence and much more strengthened by the influence of the universities and of religious leaders--though some contempt for and alienation from the French had become of increasing note in English public utterances and literature, yet Great Britain retained upon the whole the Western doctrine of civilization and of its traditions.
The increasing German reaction against those traditions, particularly in morals, was not wholly sympathetic to the temper of the gentry, at least in England, and was sometimes exasperating.
All nations have cynically violated treaties at one time or another, but there is about a solemnly undertaken treaty by the great European powers and affecting the happiness of the smaller neutral States something particularly sacred. And though it must not for one moment be regarded as the principal cause of the war, it is true that the crudity of Prussia's neglect of treaties, the too simple fashion in which Prussia proposed a breach of international obligations in the matter of Belgium, did affect the conscience of not a few powerful men in England, and, what is perhaps more important, furnished a definite and concrete point on which the doubtful issue of peace or war could repose.
