Lord Haldane was perhaps even less well fitted for such an embassy by temperament and habit of mind, than he was by position and experience. Lawyer-statesmanship, of the modern democratic sort, is of all forms of human agency the one least likely to achieve anything at Potsdam. The British emissary was tireless, industrious, and equable. His colleagues, on the other hand, were overworked, indolent, or flustered. Ready on the shortest notice to mind everybody else's business, he was allowed to mind far too much of it; and he appears to have minded most of it rather ill than well. He was no more suited to act for the Foreign Office than King Alfred was to watch the housewife's cakes.
THE HALDANE MISSION
The man whose heart swells with pride in his own ingenuity usually walks all his life in blinkers. It is not surprising that Lord Haldane's visit to the Kaiser was a failure, that it awoke distrust at the time, or that it opened the way to endless misrepresentation in the future. What surprises is his stoicism; that he should subsequently have shown so few signs of disappointment, distress, or mortification; that he should have continued up to the present moment to hold himself out as an expert on German psychology;[[6]] that he should be still upheld by his journalistic admirers, to such an extent that they even write pamphlets setting out to his credit 'what he did to thwart Germany.'[[7]]
We have been told by Mr. Asquith,[[8]] what was thought by the British Government of the outcome of Lord Haldane's embassy. We have also been informed by Germany, what was thought of it by high officials at Berlin; what inferences they drew from these conversations; what hopes they founded upon them. We do not know, however, what was thought of the incident by the other two members of the Entente; how it impressed the statesmen of Paris and Petrograd; for they must have known of the occurrence—the English representative not being one whose comings and goings would easily escape notice. The British people were told nothing; they knew nothing; and therefore, naturally enough, they thought nothing about the matter.
The British Cabinet—if Mr. Asquith's memory is to be relied on—saw through the devilish designs of Germany so soon as Lord Haldane, upon his return, unbosomed himself to the conclave in quaking whispers. We know from the Prime Minister, that when he heard how the Kaiser demanded a free hand for European conquests, as the price of a friendly understanding with England, the scales dropped from his eyes, and he realised at once that this merely meant the eating of us up later. But one cannot help wondering, since Mr. Asquith was apparently so clear-sighted about the whole matter, that he made no preparations whatsoever—military, financial, industrial, or even naval (beyond the ordinary routine)—against an explosion which—the mood and intentions of Germany being what they were now recognised to be—might occur at any moment.
COST OF AMATEUR DIPLOMACY
As to what Germany thought of the incident we know of course only what the high personages at Berlin have been pleased to tell the world about their 'sincere impressions.' They have been very busy doing this—hand upon heart as their wont is—in America and elsewhere. According to their own account they gathered from Lord Haldane's mission that the British Government and people were very much averse from being drawn into European conflicts; that we now regretted having gone quite so far as we had done in the past, in the way of entanglements and understandings; that while we could not stand by, if any other country was being threatened directly on account of arrangements it had come to with England, England certainly was by no means disposed to seek officiously for opportunities of knight-errantry. In simple words the cases of Tangier and Agadir were coloured by a special obligation, and were to be distinguished clearly from anything in the nature of a general obligation or alliance with France and Russia.
It is quite incredible that Lord Haldane ever said anything of this kind; for he would have been four times over a traitor if he had—to France; to Belgium; to his own country; also to Germany whom he would thus have misled. It is also all but incredible that a single high official at Berlin ever understood him to have spoken in this sense. But this is what the high officials have assured their own countrymen and the whole of the neutral world that they did understand; and they have called piteously on mankind to witness, how false the British Government was to an honourable understanding, so soon as trouble arose in July last with regard to Servia. Such are some of the penalties we have paid for the luxury of indulging in amateur diplomacy.
The German bureaucracy, however, always presses things too far. It is not a little like Fag in The Rivals—"whenever it draws on its invention for a good current lie, it always forges the endorsements as well as the bill." As a proof that the relations of the two countries from this time forward were of the best, inferences have been drawn industriously by the high officials at Berlin as to the meaning and extent of Anglo-German co-operation during the Balkan wars; as to agreements with regard to Africa already signed, but not published, in which Downing Street had shown itself 'surprisingly accommodating'; as to other agreements with regard to the Baghdad Railway, the Mesopotamian oil-fields, the navigation of the Tigris, and access through Basra to the Persian Gulf. These agreements, the earnest of a new entente between the Teuton nations—the United States subsequently to be welcomed in—are alleged to have been already concluded, signed and awaiting publication when war broke out.[[9]] Then trouble arises in Servia; a mere police business—nothing more—which might have been settled in a few days or at any rate weeks, if perfidious Albion had not seized the opportunity to work upon Muscovite suspicions, in order to provoke a world-war for which she had been scheming all the time!
THE SIXTH WARNING