given some
sort of place in his professions even by the statesman who has to
address Parliament and the public. He is driven to make speeches in
which a good many conceptions and ideas have to be brought together. And
it gives rise to a great difference of quality in such utterances if the
general outlook of the speaker be a large one. But this requires that he
should know himself and be aware of the conceptions and ideas which
dominate his mind, and should have examined their scope before employing
them.

How some of those who were deeply responsible for the conduct of affairs
tried to think in the anxious years before the war, and how they
endeavored to apply their conclusions, is what I have endeavored to
state in the course of what follows. They doubtless made mistakes and
fell short of accomplishment in what they were aiming at. It is human so
to do. But they tried what seemed to them the wisest course, and I have
yet to learn that it was practicable to have followed any different
course without a failure worse than any that occurred. After all, in the
end the British Empire won, however hard it had to fight.

CHAPTER II

DIPLOMACY BEFORE THE WAR

If in this chapter I speak frequently in the first person and of my own
part in the negotiations which it records, it is not from any desire to
make prominent either my own personality or the part it fell to me to
play. The reason is that I have endeavored to write of what I myself
heard and saw, and that in consequence most of what follows is, for the
sake of accuracy, largely transcribed from my personal diaries and
records made at the time when the events to which they related took
place. So frequent an employment of the personal pronoun as has been
made in these pages would ordinarily be a blemish in taste, if not in
style also, but in this case it seemed safer not to try to avoid it.

Many things that happened in the years just before 1914, as well as the
events of the great war itself, are still too close to permit of our
studying them in their full context. But before much time has passed
the historians will have accumulated material that will overflow their
libraries, and their hands will remain occupied for generations to come.
At this moment all that safely can be attempted is that actual observers
should set down what they have themselves observed. For there has rarely
been a time when the juridical maxim that "hearsay is not evidence"
ought to b