writers insinuate that if left to themselves France and Germany would reach a settlement of their differences, and that British diplomacy was being continually exercised to envenom the controversy and to draw a circle of hostile alliances round Germany.[1] This judgment is totally at variance with the ordinary British view. Our diplomacy assumes, in these despatches, the most sinister of aspects. For that very reason it deserves careful examination, especially in the light of the knowledge since acquired, that the springs which moved British diplomatic action in the course of these seven years were carefully concealed from the British people, whose own judgement of passing events was necessarily, on that account, a judgment formed upon inaccurate premises due to lack of information. Here was no question of "My country, right or wrong." "My country" was plunging and tossing in a trough of error. We moved throughout that period in the shackles of ignorance.
And there is another fact to be taken into account in considering whether the condemnation of British diplomacy by these Belgian diplomatists can be written off as simple anti-British prejudice. I refer to the high tribute paid to the British Ambassador in despatches 31 and 50. This suggests that British policy rather than Britain herself is the object of hostile criticism. Whatever view may be taken of the justice of this criticism, most people will be prepared to admit that a country is ill-served by a diplomacy which can appear in neutral eyes to be such as interpreted in these despatches, written by different men in different capitals of Europe over a long course of years.
......
The second period covered by the despatches opens with the revulsion of feeling widely caused in Britain by the narrow escape from war over Morocco, coupled with disgust at the disclosure of the secret deal.
For the British Democracy had learned—through the indiscretion of two Parisian newspapers[2]—and for the first time, of the Secret Articles attached to the Anglo-French
- ↑ The "encirclement" of Germany was not originally a German expression, but a French one. French military and Chauvinist writers continually used the term since the Anglo-French "entente" in 1904. It is actually the title of a volume published in 1913 by Commandant de Civrieux. "Le Germanisme Encerclé" (Lavauzelle).
- ↑ November, 1911.
