proceed no further with their violation of the Belgian frontier, and stop their advance, I had been instructed to demand my passports and to inform the Imperial Government that his Majesty's Government would have to take all steps in their power to uphold the neutrality of Belgium and the observance of a treaty to which Germany was as much a party as themselves."

Jagow regretfully replied that no reconsideration was possible. Goschen asked then if he might take farewell of the chancellor. Jagow begged him to do so.

Bethmann-Hollweg received his visitor "very much agitated." The plain truth seems to have been that up to the last instant Berlin had cherished the hope that, for all her threats and fury, England would not fight. Seemingly as things drew to a climax BethmannHollweg had realized that all was not well at London and had tried to put on the brakes, but the war party was now in complete control in Berlin and had thrust him aside. Now the last hope was shattered. Instead of humiliating Russia without a war, instead of fighting Russia and France simply, the war was bound to assume simply incalculable proportions. No wonder the chancellor lost self-control and "began a harangue which lasted for about twenty minutes."

England was going to war for "neutrality; 'neutrality,' a word which in war-time had been so often disregarded -just for a scrap of paper Great Britain was going to make war!" So Bethmann-Hollweg continued, his graybearded face doubtless purple with passion, his tall form leaning toward the British ambassador, while the other, with pale countenance, mantaining the habitual coolness of his race, answered that if Germany wished to talk of "life and death interests," he also "wished him to understand that it was, so to speak, a matter of 'life and death' for the honor of Great Britain that she should keep her solemn engagement to do her uttermost to defend Belgium. . . . That solemn compact simply had

to be kept, or what confidence could any one have in engagements given by Great Britain in the future."

"But at what a price will that compact have been kept!" groaned the chancellor. Clearly he was "so excited, so overcome by the news of our action, and so little disposed to hear reason that I [Goschen] refrained from adding fuel to the flame by further argument," and speedily went away.

That night a cursing, roaring crowd, brushing aside the police, cast cobblestones and lumps of coal into the front windows of the British embassy, where excited attachés were busily packing. The next morning all the world was reading the despatch from London that Great Britain had declared war on Germany the preceding midnight. England had gone in. Hereafter, for a period vastly longer and more terrible than any man in 1914 could have imagined, the history of the world was to be written not by the diplomat, but by the soldier, while "the boundaries of Europe were being retraced in blood."

On the night of August 4 came the end of that era in European history which began that fateful night in 1870 when Otto von Bismarck rewrote the Ems despatch from King William. This epoch had been ushered in by a deed which, if it had failed, would have been branded as an act of outrageous depravity but which, since it succeeded, was to be lauded as the master stroke of genius. It was to end with the chancellor of the German Empire calling a most solemn international treaty a "scrap of paper," when the ambassador of a great power talked of truth, justice, and faithfulness between nation and nation. The dawn of this epoch had seen the consolidation of the German states under the domination of Prussia into the formidable German Empire. It found its sunset when, disregarding all established sanctions, covenants, and moral processes, the rulers of this new empire surrendered themselves to schemes of world conquest which would take them straight along the paths of imperial Rome.