After Sir Edward Grey’s speech of August 3rd, Mr. T. Edmund Harvey, M.P., said: “I am convinced that this war for the great masses of the countries of Europe is no peoples’ war. It is a war that has been made by men in high places, by diplomatists working in secret, by bureaucrats out of touch with the people, by men who are a remnant of an older evil civilization.”
Lord Loreburn sums up his indictment of secret diplomacy in the following language: “Secret diplomacy has undergone its ‘acid test’ in this country. It had every chance. The voice of party was silent. The Foreign Minister was an English gentleman whom the country trusted and admired, who was wholly free from personal enmities of every kind, and who wanted peace. And secret diplomacy utterly failed. It prevented us from finding some alternative for war, and it prevented us from being prepared for war, because secret diplomacy means diplomacy aloof from Parliament.” The issue is here quite clearly stated. Those who see in the methods and spirit of the old diplomacy the chief cause of war, do not hold, on the one hand, that secret diplomacy involves at all times and in all cases unscrupulous plotting. But they believe that the method of dealing with foreign affairs as a mysterious matter, fit to be handled only by the select, and the reliance on a policy of bargains and compensations, with the aim thus artificially to maintain a balance of power, may be blamed for this great catastrophe; for they stood in the way of dealing with great public affairs in a sounder manner, that is, with more regard of the actual public interest and of the underlying racial and popular factors.
Those British critics who have attacked this method as practised in their own country before and during the war, do not thereby mean to impute to British statesmen a major share in the responsibility for the war. The high-mindedness and public spirit of the responsible statesmen is recognized by all fair critics, and most of them imply that Great Britain has far less to fear from this system than have nations with less responsible governments and a less sound tradition of statesmanship. They attack the system as a whole as it exists throughout European diplomacy, and as it has been used by the British Government.