All nations have cynically violated treaties at one time or another, but there is about a solemnly undertaken treaty by the great European powers and affecting the happiness of the smaller neutral States something particularly sacred. And though it must not for one moment be regarded as the principal cause of the war, it is true that the crudity of Prussia's neglect of treaties, the too simple fashion in which Prussia proposed a breach of international obligations in the matter of Belgium, did affect the conscience of not a few powerful men in England, and, what is perhaps more important, furnished a definite and concrete point on which the doubtful issue of peace or war could repose.

It must be remembered in this connection that Prussia had a novel tradition of her own in such matters. The phrase "The Frederickian tradition" is an accurate phrase. Frederick the Great did start the open and avowed doctrine that a breach of international convention and of international morals is always tolerable in the aggrandizement of one's country.

I think one is not telling the truth if one says that the proposed violation of Belgian territory for the invasion of France was of a nature to cause an explosion of anger in the very hardened minds of the professional politicians in any modern country. There is not one group of them that has not been guilty of something of the sort before. But I think one is telling the truth if one says that the over-simple and cold way in which Prussia took it for granted that the violation of a solemn and most important treaty was nothing just shocked opinion, even of the politicians, sufficiently to help to incline the balance against her.

There is much more. The Prussian estimate of Russian, of French, and even of English psychology was very erroneous. The Prussian way of getting France not to join is about as subtle as spitting in a man's face, and the elephantine gambols of the German diplomats in London during the fatal week preceding the war were a positive aid to the catastrophe that was about to take place. They blundered as hard and as heavily as it was possible to blunder; going to the wrong people; despising the subtly powerful; paying court to the more advertised and less controlling of the English public men, and in a word behaving themselves after that fashion for which we have coined the adjective "newspaper."

There was further the peculiar aggravation of the tone in which the Austrian note had been addressed to Servia. There was further the patent and almost puerile double dealing of Berlin in the attempted negotiations for peace between Russia and Austria—in which negotiations the British Cabinet was very prominent. But beyond all these other minor points, these three causes I have mentioned, by their convergence, seem to have determined England's participation in the war, with all the enormous but as yet unguessed consequences that will follow therefrom.

I repeat, I do not say that any one of those three causes would in itself have been sufficient. The three combining were just sufficient, and this account, if I am not mistaken, justly presents the picture that history should have of the manner in which Great Britain determined to conclude the long process of her recent diplomatic revolution and to engage with the Allies against the German Empire and the Hapsburg house, which the German Empire tows in its wake.

AT THE VILLA ACHILLEION CORFU.

By H.T. SUDDUTH.

A HAUNTING presence seems to fill the air,
A shade of grandeur gone and e'er to be
One with the legends of the Ionian Sea—
One memory more linked with Corcyra fair,
Disjoined, alas! from presence otherwhere—
A lost illusion of the years once free
And glorious in the kindling memory
Of grand Homeric Past still lingering there!
The olive orchards crown the hills; the vine
And rose still flourish on the sunny slopes
As in Alcinous' Gardens; Morning opes
Her eyes irradiant with the dawn divine!
But now no longer at Achilleion
The Kaiser wakes to see fair Eos dawn.
In Belgian or in Russian lands afar,
Beneath the smoke-cloud cope of shrouded Heaven
Where hissing shot and shell and War's red levin
Spread far and wide the canopy of War!
Where Nature shudders and seems to abhor
The awful scene; where myriad souls, unshriven,
From life and all its joys at once are riven,
Behold the Kaiser now 'neath Mars' red star!
A stern and sombre, gray-haired figure he,
And standing midst the wreck of youthful dreams
Sees he at times through battle smoke the gleams
Of rippling waves on blue Ionian Sea?
Thinks he not sadly on the days now gone,
And dreams he dreamed at fair Achilleion?