Before the War | Page 6

moment should show how we could profit, before we
gave any assurance as to the way in which we should act. What has
given rise to this misunderstanding of our attitude in our relations to
other countries is simply an exemplification of what has prevented us
from fully understanding ourselves. It is our gift to be able to apply
ourselves in emergencies, at home and abroad, with immense energy,
and our success in promptly pulling ourselves together and coping with
the unexpected has often suggested to outsiders that we had long ago

looked ahead. This has been said of us on the Continent. It is not so.
We do not study the art of fishing in troubled waters. The waiting habit
in our transactions, domestic as well as foreign, arises from our
inveterate preference for thinking in images rather than in concepts. We
put off decisions until the whole of the facts can be visualized. This
carries with it that we often do not act until it is very late. Our gifts
enable us to move with energy, if not always with precision. To predict
what we will do in a given case is not easy for a foreigner. It is not easy
even for ourselves. We have few abstract principles, and reliable
induction from our past is not easy. We are often guided by what Mr.
Justice Wendell Holmes has called "the intuition more subtle than any
particular major premise." Nor is help to be derived from any study of
our general outlook on life, for that outlook is hard to formulate even to
ourselves.
Now all this, our peculiar gift, if kept under control, may well have its
practical advantage, but, as the case stands, it is apt to bring in its train
a good deal of disadvantage. In periods when nations are trying to
render firm the basis of peace by remolding and giving precision to
their aims, so that these can be made common aims, lack of
definiteness in national ideals is a sure source of embarrassment. At a
time when democracy is more and more claiming in terms to occupy
the whole field it becomes increasingly desirable that the higher
purposes of democracy should become clear to the people themselves.
For the practise of a country can never be wholly divorced from its
theory of life. The tendencies of the national will are bound up with the
nation's science, with its literature, with its art, and with its religion.
These tendencies are affected by the capacity of the nation to
understand and express its own soul. Beyond science, literature, art and
religion there lies something that may be called the national philosophy,
a disposition rather than a definite creed. This sort of philosophy is
different in France from what it is in Germany, and in Germany from
what it is in the English-speaking countries. The philosophy of a people
takes shape in the attitude its leaders adopt in their estimation of values
and of the order in which they should be placed. And this turns on the
conceptions and ideas which are current in the various departments of
mental activity. It is thus that a philosophy of life has to be given some

sort of place in his professions even by the statesman who has to
address Parliament and the public. He is driven to make speeches in
which a good many conceptions and ideas have to be brought together.
And it gives rise to a great difference of quality in such utterances if the
general outlook of the speaker be a large one. But this requires that he
should know himself and be aware of the conceptions and ideas which
dominate his mind, and should have examined their scope before
employing them.
How some of those who were deeply responsible for the conduct of
affairs tried to think in the anxious years before the war, and how they
endeavored to apply their conclusions, is what I have endeavored to
state in the course of what follows. They doubtless made mistakes and
fell short of accomplishment in what they were aiming at. It is human
so to do. But they tried what seemed to them the wisest course, and I
have yet to learn that it was practicable to have followed any different
course without a failure worse than any that occurred. After all, in the
end the British Empire won, however hard it had to fight.
CHAPTER II
DIPLOMACY BEFORE THE WAR
If in this chapter I speak frequently in the first person and of my own
part in the negotiations which it records, it is not from any desire to
make prominent either my own personality or the part it fell to me to
play. The reason is that I have endeavored to write of