The Prime Minister of the morrow continued:—
‘The Saturday after war had actually been declared on the Continent (Saturday, 1st August), a poll of the electors of Great Britain would have shown ninety-five per cent. against embroiling this country in hostilities. Powerful city financiers whom it was my duty to interview this Saturday on the financial situation, ended the conference with an earnest hope that Britain would keep out of it. A poll on the following Tuesday would have resulted in a vote of ninety-nine per cent. in favour of war.
‘What had happened in the meantime? The revolution in public sentiment was attributable entirely to an attack made by Germany on a small and unprotected country, which had done her no wrong, and what Britain was not prepared to do for interests political and commercial, she readily risked to help the weak and helpless. Our honour as a nation is involved in this war, because we are bound in an honourable obligation to defend the independence, the liberty, the integrity of a small neighbour that has lived peaceably; but she could not have compelled us, being weak. The man who declined to discharge his debt because his creditor is too poor to enforce it, is a blackguard.’
A little later, in the same interview, Mr Lloyd George, after allusion to German misrepresentations, said:—
‘But this I know is true—after the guarantee given that the German fleet would not attack the coast of France or annex any French territory, I would not have been party to a declaration of war, had Belgium not been invaded, and I think I can say the same thing for most, if not all, of my colleagues. If Germany had been wise, she would not have set foot on Belgian soil. The Liberal Government then would not have intervened. Germany made a grave mistake.’[35]
This interview compels several very important conclusions. One, perhaps the most important—and the most hopeful—is profoundly creditable to English popular instinct and not so creditable to Mr Lloyd George.
If Mr Lloyd George is speaking the truth (it is difficult to find just the phrase which shall express one’s meaning and be Parliamentary), if he believes it would have been entirely safe for Great Britain to have kept out of the War provided only that the invasion of Belgium could have been prevented, then indeed is the account against the Cabinet, of which he was then a member and (after modifications in it) was shortly to become the head, a heavy one. I shall not pursue here the inquiry whether in point of simple political fact, Belgium was the sole cause of our entrance into the War, because I don’t suppose anybody believes it. But—and here Mr Lloyd George almost certainly does speak the truth—the English people gave their whole-souled support to the war because they believed it to be for a cause of which Belgium was the shining example and symbol: the right of the small nation to the same consideration as the great. That objective may not have been the main inspiration of the Governments: it was the main moral inspiration of the British people, the sentiment which the Government exploited, and to which it mainly appealed.
‘The purpose of the Allies in this War,’ said Mr Asquith, ‘is to pave the way for an international system which will secure the principle of equal rights for all civilised States ... to render secure the principle that international problems must be handled by free people and that their settlement shall no longer be hampered and swayed by the overmastering dictation of a Government controlled by a military caste.’ We should not sheathe the sword ‘until the rights of the smaller nationalities of Europe are placed upon an unassailable foundation.’ Professor Headlam (an ardent upholder of the Balance of Power, by the way), in a book that is characteristic of the early war literature, says the cardinal principles for which the War was fought were two: first, that Europe is, and should remain, divided between independent national States, and, second, that subject to the condition that it did not threaten or interfere with the security of other States, each country should have full and complete control over its own affairs.
How far has our victory achieved that object? Is the policy which our power supported before the War—and still supports—compatible with it? Does it help to strengthen the national security of Belgium, and other weak States like Yugo-Slavia, Poland, Albania, Finland, the Russian Border States, China?
It is here suggested, first, that our commitments under the Balance of Power policy which we had espoused[36] deprived our national force of any preventive effectiveness whatever in so far as the invasion of Belgium was concerned, and secondly, that our post-war policy, which is also in fact a Balance of Power policy is betraying in like fashion the cause of the small State.