[Footnote 168: p. 15 (see Appendix I _infra_).]

[Footnote 169: p. 16 (_ibid._).]

[Footnote 170: _Correspondence_, No. 5. Sir E. Grey to Sir M. de Bunsen,
July 24. The text is also given in the German White Book (pp. 18-23),
which will be found in Appendix I.]

[Footnote 171: _Ibid_. No. 14. Sir E. Grey to Sir F. Bertie, July 25.]

[Footnote 172: _Ibid_. No. 4. Communicated by Count Mensdorff, July 24.]

[Footnote 173: _Correspondence_, No. 39. Communicated by the Servian
Minister, July 27. See also German White Book (pp. 23-32), _infra_ in
Appendix I.]

[Footnote 174: German White Book, pp. 24 _et sqq_.; see _infra_ Appendix
I.]

[Footnote 175: _Correspondence_, No. 5. Sir E. Grey to Sir M. de Bunsen,
July 24.]

[Footnote 176: German White Book, pp. 29 _et sqq_.; see _infra_ Appendix
I.]

[Footnote 177: _Correspondence_, No. 64. Sir R. Rodd to Sir E. Grey,
July 28.]

[Footnote 178: _Ibid_. No. 41. Sir M. de Bunsen to Sir E. Grey, July
27.]

CHAPTER VI

THE NEW GERMAN THEORY OF THE STATE

The war in which England is now engaged with Germany is fundamentally a
war between two different principles--that of _raison d'etat_, and that
of the rule of law. The antagonism between these two principles appeared
in our own internal history as far back as the seventeenth century, when
the Stuarts championed the theory of state-necessity and the practice of
a prerogative free to act outside and above the law in order to meet the
demands of state-necessity, and when Parliament defended the rule of law
and sought to include the Crown under that law. The same antagonism now
appears externally in a struggle between two nations, one of which
claims a prerogative to act outside and above the public law of Europe
in order to secure the 'safety' of its own state, while the other stands
for the rule of public law. The one regards international covenants to
which it has pledged its own word as 'scraps of paper' when they stand
in the way of _salus populi_; the other regards the maintenance of such
covenants as a grave and inevitable obligation.

Taught by Treitschke, whom they regard as their great national
historian, and whose lectures on _Politik_ have become a gospel, the
Germans of to-day assume as an ultimate end and a final standard what
they regard as the national German state.[179] 'The state', says
Treitschke, 'is the highest thing in the external society of man: above
it there is nothing at all in the his