it could
not have got this power if Governments had been governing solely for
the good of their peoples. "Bow down your heads before God," is the
invocation constantly used in the Missal during the penitential
season of Lent and the government of every nation needed this call to
repentance.

With this interpretation Chesterton would have agreed. All nations
were to blame for the predisposing causes that made a world-war
possible. But when we come to the question of actual responsibility
for making this particular war, the statement means something very
different and something with which Chesterton was prepared to join
issue. Against him those who disliked France or England, and saw the
history of those two countries as a history of Imperialism, were
saying: if Germany had not attacked France, France would have
attacked Germany; or: England would have been equally treacherous if
it had paid her--look at the Treaty of Limerick.

Chesterton kept imploring people simply to look at the facts. Germany
had in fact broken her word to France and attacked her. France had
not attacked Germany. Germany had invaded Belgium. England had not
invaded Holland "to seize a naval and commercial advantage; and
whether they say that we wished to do it in our greed or feared to do
it in our cowardice, the fact remains that we did not do it. Unless
this common-sense principle be kept in view, I cannot conceive how
any quarrel can possibly be judged. A contract may be made between
two persons solely for material advantage on each side: but the moral
advantage is still generally supposed to lie with the person who
keeps the contract."*

[* _The Barbarism of Berlin_, 15-16.]

The promise and the vow were fundamental to Chesterton's view of
human life. Discussing divorce he claims as essential to manhood the
right to bind oneself and to be taken at one's word. The marriage vow
was almost the only vow that remained out of the whole mediaeval
conception of chivalry and he could not endure to see it set at
nought. But even in the modern world there still remained some notion
of the sacredness of a solemn promise.

"It is plain that the promise, or extension of responsibility through
time, is what chiefly distinguishes us, I will not say from savages,
but from brutes and reptiles. This was noted by the shrewdness of the
Old Testament, when it summed up the dark, irresponsible enormity of
Leviathan in the words, 'Will he make a pact with thee?'