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.
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