It was entirely different with Germany. For many years past she had been more occupied with her grievances against Britain, and with the complications and dangers which would beset any attempt at redress, than with any other single subject; or indeed, so it would appear, with all other subjects put together.
It is important to understand the German point of view, but it is difficult. For at once we are faced with the eternal obstacle of the foreigner, who sets out in search of a simple explanation. The mind of the ordinary man, like that of the philosopher, is hypnotised by a basic assumption of the One-ness of Things. He wants to trace all trouble to a single root, as if it were a corn and could be extracted. But in an enquiry like the present we are confronted at every turn with the Two-ness of Things, or indeed with the Multiplicity of Things.
We have only to read a few pages of any German book on England to see that the other party to the dispute is confronted with exactly the same difficulty. We are amazed, and perhaps not altogether chagrined, to discover that, to German eyes, British policy appears to be a thing of the most rigorous consistency. It is deliberate, far-sighted, and ruthless. It is pursued with constancy from decade to decade--nay from century to century--never faltering, never retreating, but always going forward under Whig and Tory, Liberal and Conservative alike, to the same goal. And we of course know, if we know anything, that this picture, though very flattering to our political instinct, is untrue.
If Englishmen know anything at all, they know that the foreign policy of this country during the last fifty years--under Lord Beaconsfield, and Mr. Gladstone, Lord Salisbury, and Mr. Asquith--has been at times a series of the most eccentric wobbles and plunges, like a kite which is drawn at the wrong angle to the wind. Nay, even as regards our participation in this very War--which in the German White Book is asserted to have been preconceived and undertaken by us with a craft and coolness worthy of Machiavelli himself--we can see from our own White Paper that the final decision wavered this way and the other, from day to day during the critical week, neither the Cabinet nor public opinion being clear and unanimous as to the course which ought to be pursued.