"It was a great pleasure to see you and to have had the full and unreserved talk we had together. My ambition is like yours, to bring Germany and Great Britain into relations of ever-closer intimacy and friendship. Our two countries have a common work to do for the world as well as for themselves, and each of them can bring to bear on this work special endowments and qualities. May the co-operation which I believe is now beginning become closer and closer.[[194]]
[!-- Note Anchor 194 --][Footnote 194: Lord Haldane has stated during the war that his visit to Berlin in 1912 had filled his mind with doubt and suspicion in regard to Germany.—Author.]
"Of this I am sure, the more wide and unselfish the nations and the groups questions make her supreme purposes of their policies, the more will frictions disappear, and the sooner will the relations that are normal and healthy reappear.[[195]] Something of this good work has now come into existence between our two peoples. We must see to it that the chance of growth is given."[[196]]
[!-- Note Anchor 195 --][Footnote 195: A word or phrase appears to have been dropped in this sentence.—Author.]
[!-- Note Anchor 196 --][Footnote 196: Professor Schiemann's book, pp. 27-8.]
It is not difficult to conceive that such utterances, on the part of two British ministers, would raise hopes in the German mind, for it would be useless to imagine that Professor Schiemann would keep them secret for his own private edification. And it is possible that they led the German Government into a false reckoning as to what this country would do under certain circumstances, and so encouraged Germany into taking up an irreconcilable attitude in the crisis of July, 1914.
Whatever Germany expected must, however, for the present, remain a matter of conjecture. Schiemann's comment on the above letter leaves no doubt that he expected Lord Haldane[[197]] to resign. "When one remembers that Lord Haldane belonged to the inner circle of the Cabinet, and was therefore privy to all the secret moves of Sir Edward Grey, it is hard to believe in the sincerity of the sentiments expressed in this letter. Besides, he did not resign like three other members of the Cabinet (Lord Morley, Burns and Charles Trevelyan) when Sir Edward's foul play lay open to the world on August 4th."
[!-- Note Anchor 197 --][Footnote 197: Lord Haldane seems to have injured his reputation both in Great Britain and Germany. Professor Oncken designates him: "the one-time friend of Germany, the decoy-bird of the British cabinet." Vide "Deutschland und der Weltkrieg," p. 561.]
The most regrettable side of the whole incident is that the resignation of the above gentlemen has been proclaimed by innumerable German writers as proof of Sir Edward Grey's double dealing, and proof that Britain is waging an unjust war. Still, it may console these gentlemen to know that the nation which wages war on women and children acclaims them to-day "all honourable men," and doubtless without the Shakespearian intonation.
By reason of the above incidents, and more of a similar nature, Germans accuse the late Liberal Government with perfidy of the basest kind. The author is not in the least inclined to admit the charge, but thinks, rather, that the Government in question—individually and collectively—was astonishingly ignorant of European conditions and problems, especially those prevailing in the Germanic Empires.