render war inevitable it is no use now
to beg people not to make a disturbance, but to come to London to be
kindly but firmly spoken to by Sir Edward Grey."

To find the motive powerful enough to have plunged all Europe into war
in the short space of a few hours, we must seek it, not in the pages
of a "white paper" covering a period of only fifteen days (July 20th
to August 4th, 1914), but in the long anterior activities that led the
great Powers of Europe into definite commitments to each other. For
the purposes of this investigation we can eliminate at once three of
the actual combatants, as being merely "accessories after the fact,"
viz.:--Servia, Belgium and Japan, and confine our study of the
causes of the conflict to the aims and motives of the five principal
combatants. For it is clear that in the quarrel between Servia and
Austria, Hungary is only a side issue of the larger question that
divides Europe into armed camps. Were categoric proof sought of how
small a part the quarrel between Vienna and Belgrade played in the
larger tragedy, it can be found in the urgent insistence of the
Russian Government itself in the very beginning of the diplomatic
conversations that preceded the outbreak of hostilities.

As early as the 24th of July, the Russian Government sought to prevail
upon Great Britain to proclaim its complete solidarity with Russia and
France, and on the British Ambassador in St. Petersburg pointing out
that "direct British interests in Servia were nil, and a war on behalf
of that country would never be sanctioned by British public opinion,"
the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs replied that "we must not
forget that the _general European_ question was involved, the Servian
question being but a part of the former, and that Great Britain
could not afford to efface herself from the problem _now at issue_."
(Despatch of Sir G. Buchanan to Sir E. Grey, 24th July, 1914).

Those problems involved far mightier questions than the relations of
Servia to Austria, the neutrality of Belgium or the wish of Japan to
keep the peace of the East by seizing Kiao-Chau.

The neutrality never became a war issue until long after war had been
decided on and had actually broken out; while Japan came into the
contest solely because Europe had obligingly provided one, and because
one European power preferred, for its own ends, to strengthen an
Asiatic race to seeing a kindred white people it feared grow stronger
in the sun.