But chance plays the largest part in the drama of life, and accident
often confounds the plans of men. Not feeling entirely sure of his
letter the pacifist Minister put it in his pocket when he dressed
that night to go out to dinner. And when he sat down at table he found
himself seated next to the able, earnest, and passionately patriotic
Minister for Belgium. Perhaps he was urging some objections to British
intervention, when his neighbour said: “But what about Belgium? You have
promised to protect her, and if you don’t do so she will be destroyed.”
That raised visions of the work of the little nations; memories of
their immense contributions to human progress from the days of Israel
downwards; thoughts of the vast loss to liberty, to morality, to
religion, and to all the other fruits of the unfettered soul that
would come to the world from the over-riding of the weak peoples by
the strong. The result was swift and sure--the letter in the Minister’s
pocket never reached the important person to whom it was addressed.
Only God knows whether this period, however short, of indecision among
our people, and particularly among our responsible statesmen, with the
consequent delay in dispatching a determined warning to Germany (“Hands
off Belgium,”) contributed to the making of the war. But it is at least
an evidence of our desire for peace, and a sufficient assurance that
if unseen powers were working on our side also, they were the powers of
good. Yet so strangely do the invisible forces confound the plans of men
that the crowning proof of this came two days later--on August 8, in
the Commons--when our Foreign Minister defined the British position, and
practically declared for war.
It is not idle rumour that the Government went down to the House that
day expecting to be resisted. The sequel was a startling surprise. Sir
Edward Grey’s speech was far from a great oration. It gave the effect of
being unprepared as to form, so loosely did the vehicle hang together,
the sentences sometimes coming with strange inexactitude for the tongue
of one whose written word in dispatches has a clarity and precision that
have never been excelled. But it had the supreme qualities of manifest
sincerity and transparent honesty, and it derived its overwhelming
effect from one transcendent characteristic of which the speaker himself
may have been quite unconscious. It spoke to the British Empire as to a
British gentleman. “You can’t stand by and do nothing while the friend
by your side is being beaten to his knees. You can’t let a mischievous
and unprincipled buccaneer tread into the dust the neighbour whom he has
joined with you in swearing to protect?” There was no resisting that
Our own interest might leave us cold; we might even be sceptical of our
danger. But we were put on our honour, and every man in the House with
the instincts of a gentleman was swept away by that appeal as by a
flood.
“WHY ISN’T THE HOUSE CHEERING?”
Then came our Prime Minister’s passionate, fiery, yet dignified and even
exalted denunciation of the proposal of Germany that we should trade
with her in our neutrality by committing treachery to France and
Belgium--(“To accept your infamous offer would be to cover the glorious
name of England with undying shame”); then the announcement of the
ultimatum sent by Great Britain to Germany demanding an assurance that
the neutrality of Belgium should be respected; and finally that speech
of John Redmond’s, which, spoken on the very top of the crisis that had
threatened to bring a fratricidal war into Ireland, has been, perhaps,
the most thrilling and dramatic utterance yet produced by the war. “I
tell the Government they may take every British soldier out of Ireland
to meet the enemy of the Empire. Ireland’s sons will take care of
Ireland. The Catholics of the South will stand shoulder to shoulder
with their Protestant fellow-countrymen of the North to fight the common
foe.”
It was another appeal to the gentlemen in the British nation, and in
one moment it swept the bitter waters of the Home Rule crisis out of
all sight and memory. I have heard a Cabinet Minister say that, as he
listened to Redmond’s speech, he was surprised at the silence with which
it was received. “Why isn’t the House cheering?” he had asked himself.
But all at once he had felt his eyes swimming and his throat tightening,
and then he had understood.