on," and to preserve the
neutrality of England in those interests. But at the moment at which he
spoke the eyes of English statesmen were looking at one thing alone. It was
not a question of what French statesmen expected them to do. The British
Government had explained quite clearly to French statesmen that they must
not expect armed support from England. This fact had been made clear to the
French Foreign Office long before in a series of conversations between the
statesmen, and it had been embodied in a letter from Sir E. Grey to the
French Ambassador. But when the shadow of war actually fell on France these
conversations and this letter faded into the background. It was no longer a
question of what the French President expected from the King of England. It
was a question of what Jacques Roturier, artisan in the streets of Paris,
knowing that the Germans were on the frontier and might be dropping their
shells into Paris in a fortnight, expected from John Smith, shopkeeper in
the East India Dock Road, London, safe behind the English Channel from all
the horrors of war. That was, not rhetorically but in all soberness of
fact, the real "international obligation" on August 3, 1914; for though
treaties are made by statesmen they are in the long run interpreted, not
by statesmen, but by the public opinion which becomes slowly centred on
them--by the hopes and fears of millions of working men and women who have
never read the terms of the treaty but to whom it has become the symbol of
a friendship on which they can draw in case of need. The magistrate may
write the marriage lines, but the marriage becomes what the husband and
wife make it--a thing far deeper and more binding than any legal contract.

In the light of these considerations, we can establish one point of supreme
importance in dealing with foreign policy--namely, that the causes of war
are very different from the immediate occasions of war. When the British
Government, at the outbreak of the present war, published a White Paper
containing the diplomatic correspondence between July 20 and August 4,
1914, they were publishing evidence as to the immediate occasion of
war--namely the Austrian ultimatum of July 23 to Serbia which brought on
the war. In the twelve days which intervened between the delivery of that
ultimatum and the declaration of war between England and Germany, the
negotiations on which hung the immediate fate of Europe were, it is true,
conducted by a