derstand. Her neutrality is most precious
to us[84].

Well, I have of course a divided mind. I think of those old days in
Liverpool and Devonshire--how far off they seem! And yet I spent all
last year in England. It was in March last when I was with you and we
talked of the amazing treatment of your army--I cannot any longer call
it _our_ army--by ministers crying for the resignation of its officers
and eager to make their humiliation an election cry! How far off that
seems, too! Let me tell you that it was the conduct of your ministers,
Churchill especially, that made people here so confident that your
Government could not fight. It seemed impossible that Lloyd George and
his following could have the effrontery to pose as a "war" cabinet;
still more impossible that any sane people could trust them if they did!
Perhaps you may remember a talk we had also in March about Matthew
Arnold whom I was reading again during my convalescence at Sidmouth. You
said that "Friendship's Garland" and its Arminius could not be written
now. I disputed that and told you that it was still true that your
Government talked and "gassed" just as much as ever, and were wilfully
blind to the fact that your power of action was wholly unequal to your
words. As in 1870 so now. Nay, worse, your rulers have always known it
perfectly well, but refused to see it or to admit it, because they
wanted office and knew that to say the truth would bring the radical
vote in the cities upon their poor heads. It is the old hypocrisy, in
the sense in which Germans have always accused your nation: alas! and it
is half my nation too. You pride yourselves on "Keeping your word" to
Belgium. But you pride yourselves also, not so overtly just now, on
always refusing to prepare yourselves to keep that word in _deed_. In
the first days of August you knew, absolutely and beyond all doubt, that
you could do nothing to make good your word. You had not the moral
courage to say so, and, having said so, to act accordingly and to warn
Belgium that your promise was "a scrap of paper," and effectively
nothing more. It _is_ nothing more, and has proved to be nothing more,
but you do not see that your indelible disgrace lies just in this, that
you unctuously proclaim that you are keeping your word when all the time
you know, you have always known, that you refused utterly and completely
to take the needful steps to enable you to translate word into action.
Have you not torn up your