Mr. Booth: "Is the noble Lord aware that the Germans in New York toasted the health of the Foreign Office at Christmas time?"
No answer was returned.
On January 26th, 1916, Sir Edward Grey delivered his promised reply in the House of Commons. It was brilliant oratory, but it was not argument. It was a defence of the Navy, which needed no defence. It was a masterpiece of forensic jurisprudence, but it revealed between the chinks of polished sentences and high-sounding declamation, in startling nakedness, the weaknesses, the unwarrantable hesitating caution, or the downright cowardice of the Cabinet. With such grace and skill did the speaker unfold his case that a reader, unaware of the facts concealed behind it, would believe the policy and actions of the Government had been hitherto faultless, flawless, and blameless. Reading it at a later date brought to my mind the story of a poacher's wife, who with tears of grateful joy streaming down her countenance, thanked a learned junior counsel for his able and successful defence of her husband, who had been charged with stealing a certain shot-gun.
"My good woman," replied her modest advocate, "it was only a mistake. The judge truly said that your good husband left the Court without a stain upon his character. It was only alleged that he stole the gun."
"Alleged be bothered," said the woman; "why, we've got the gun at home now!"
If this speech of Sir Edward Grey, as a speech, had a fault at all, it was that the defence he made was too good to ring true. At the time of its utterance it appeared to appease the House. No one wished to hamper the Government, which, like the energetic but painfully inefficient pianist at a certain Western mining camp, was protected by proclamation: "Please don't shoot. He's doing his best." But outside the House the underlying effect of the speech upon thinking people was very different. It created satisfaction in Germany and amongst neutral Governments. It caused great jubilation amongst the vast army of mushroom traders and adventurers abroad who were piling up fortunes by illicit trading. But it left Englishmen and our true sympathisers in this tragic war irritable, indignant, and unsatisfied; smouldering in their just wrath at the confessed weak-kneed policy of politicians, who, however good their intentions, proved that they had not yet grasped the difference between a quarrel at law and a quarrel at war.
It left the nation disappointed. The people felt we had been fooling with the war too long; that the time had arrived for some strong and decisive action. That politics and patronage should be shelved and the Navy given a free hand. It remembered how the Government had hesitated, procrastinated, and vacillated in this so-called blockade, as in other matters. It remembered that Parliament had refused to pass a code of international rules called the Declaration of London because that code, made largely to please Germany, weakened the hands of the Navy. It remembered that the Government had gone behind the back of Parliament and illegally put that very code into operation after war began. It had not forgotten that this proved such a scandalous weakening of our right and our strength that soon after the Coalition Government came into being that code was said to have been scrapped. Even as to this doubts arose for long afterwards.[21]
It had not forgotten the seventeen long months of public pressure and the trouble there had been to force cotton as contraband; nor the seventeen months of "wait and see" before the Navy was permitted to examine mails and extract (inter alia) parcels of rubber. It had not forgotten Sir Edward Grey's declaration that "he had no intention of making cotton contraband"; nor Lord Haldane's contention that "it was useless stopping the import of cotton to Germany, because if we did Germany could find a substitute for it."
The nation had been deceived and lulled to sleep before by soft words and gentle assurances. It had been told, "we decline to be bound by judicial niceties." It had been promised "to prevent commodities of any kind from entering or leaving the enemy's country"; "to stick at nothing." It remembered with some misgiving how these promises had been kept.[22]
What, it reasoned, were the disappointments of a few Dutch and Scandinavian adventurers from making fortunes out of a war which to ourselves was a tragedy? The country had unbounded confidence in the Navy. It had not unbounded confidence in either the Government or the Foreign Office. It hungered with an overwhelming desire to know why the Navy should not be given a free and unhampered hand.