remain neutral in case of a conflict between Germany and Russia. The next day Viviani replied briefly: France will do what her interests dictate. He could not be induced to clarify this vague remark. In the afternoon of August 3, von Schoen received a cipher telegram from the Imperial Chancellor, indicating that the matter it dealt with was important; but so garbled only fragments could be deciphered. It contained a declaration of war. Viviani received this without any appearance of surprise or perturbation, as if it were something long expected. The die was cast. The Ambassador of conciliation left his land of illusion. The author concludes this book with a new discussion of the old question as to who was responsible for the war. He is not temperamentally prone to violent passions, inclined to challenging or bullying policies, or disposed to exaggeration and prejudiced opinions. He describes events objectively, discusses nations and individuals calmly, just as he performed the duties of his office. His final judgment is: All in all, Germany is not free from guilt, but she is not responsible in the sense or in the degree commonly charged against her. Our country blundered and failed, not so much because she did not want peace, as because she lacked steady and resolute leadership. Like all other governments, she had counted on the possibility of war and armed against such an event; but she did not seek war outright or purposely invite one, as her enemies charge. Summarizing this opinion, the diplomat says: 'The war was not the child of any ruler's brain. It was not the outcome of the acts and omissions of any single nation. It was the tragic fruit of elemental impulses among peoples, of long-standing hostilities between governments, which we lacked leaders great enough and able enough to accommodate peaceably.' II A true and complete history of the World War cannot be written by its contemporaries. Rumania's leading statesman, who feels compelled by a fore the tribunal of the world's consense of duty to lay his testimony bescience, says: "To comprehend this event, it will be necessary to be separated from it by a period of time.' None the less, this statesman is able to give us evidence of unusual weight regarding the real responsibility for the war. Particularly significant are the conversations upon public affairs, which he had at different times with Count Berchtold, the Vienna Foreign Minister, who delivered the ultimatum to Serbia, with Count Aehrenthal, a predecessor in that office, and with Kiderlen-Waechter, the veteran Foreign Minister at Berlin. Here is his portrait of the first of these gentlemen: 'A handsome man, whose appearance became his office, well-groomed, suave, very courteous and . . . But that is sufficient. No other description would befit Count Berchtold. When he visited Sinaia, our famous Carpathian resort, to see the King, I was making an automobile trip through Northern Italy. A telegram reached me at Venice. It was from a friend, stating that it would be agreeable were I to visit Vienna. . . . I understood at once that my King, foreseeing an early change in the Cabinet, desired me to become personally acquainted with the new director of Austria's foreign policy. I advised Berchtold of my wish to see him, and he returned to the capital from the country expressly to receive me. We talked for an hour or more. During the conversation I referred to Austria's naval programme. I said: 'Why do you want a powerful navy? You don't own and you never will own colonies. Your overseas trade will never be of vital importance. Why then do you want a great fleet? If you are building against Italy, I assure you that I listened with astonishment to this Foreign Minister of a great power, who did not appreciate that England would resort to compulsory service the moment she found herself unable to otherwise man her navy, because she would, under no circumstances, permit herself to fall behind Germany. Jonescu relates some very interesting remarks by Aehrenthal, which the latter made to him a few months before his death. He tells us that, though the Austrian Minister's mind was perfectly clear, he experienced great difficulty in speaking, and stuttered badly. The Count was intensely exasperated by his controversy with Archduke Ferdinand. He said to me: "There are people in my country who blame me for preventing a war with Italy. They assert that Italy will never agree with us, and therefore it would be better to settle our reckoning with her now. But I am convinced I have acted wisely. Even though Italy may never fight shoulder to shoulder with us, we would have acted wrongly and unwisely in attacking her when she was engaged elsewhere.' Aehrenthal, who was an absolutist and a reactionary, had always been opposed to Take Jonescu on the questions at issue between Hungary and Rumania. Consequently, the latter was much surprised to find that the old statesman had changed his mind, and that he had become almost a republican. Aehrenthal said to him: 'See here. France has refuted absolutely all my theories. The French Republic has pursued an excellent foreign policy with undeniable success. Just consider her diplomacy. The whole diplomatic corps of Germany and Austria together is n't worth the trio of the two Cambon brothers and Barrère, to say nothing of the rest of them.' 'How's that!' I replied. 'Are you Count Aehrenthal, who say such things to me here at the Ballplatz, with the portraits of Metternich and Kaunitz looking down on us!' 'I am he. Life has its lessons for all of us!' According to the testimony of the Rumanian statesman, whose patriotism and whose loyalty to the Entente are above question, the man least of all responsible for our great catastrophe, and more than that, the sincerest champion of a pacifist policy, was the late German Foreign Minister, KiderlenWaechter. For some ten years he and Take Jonescu were intimate friends. They had an opportunity to become closely acquainted and to know each other's excellencies and defects. First of all, Kiderlen was a man of great intellect. He had one of those intellects which are an ornament to the human race. And with him the intellect was nearly everything. I do not mean that he lacked heart. Quite the contrary. But one can say without injustice that he was not governed by sentiment. He was not an idealist. He was, first and foremost, a man of clear, comprehensive, and practical intellectual insight. It should be known that Kiderlen enjoyed extraordinary liberty of action. He would not flatter any one for personal reasons. For him it was the same to be the friend of the Kaiser as to be the friend of any other man. Kiderlen stood erect before his monarch, with an independence of mind which made him refuse definitely to accept certain conditions it was desired to impose upon him soon after his appointment as Foreign Minister. His reply to such suggestions was: 'I shall assume this office to run it as I personally think right, or I shall not accept it.' Kiderlen remarked to me during a conversation which we had in 1911: 'So long as I am alive and hold my present position in the government, there will be no war between Germany and England. If he [the Kaiser] ever disposes otherwise, he will have to get another Minister. I will not subordinate my conscience to any person.' He resigned his post as Ambassador to Rumania to become Minister of Foreign Affairs. A few days before he left Bucharest, we took a walk together as was our custom. He disclosed to me at that time what he planned as to Germany's relations with France. 'I have told him [the Kaiser] that all our efforts to make an alliance with France are predestined to failure. It is impossible to win the friendship of France. I know as well as any person in the world that France wants peace and will never attack us. Of that I am perfectly convinced. But I also know that if another power should attack us, no government could prevent France from attacking us also. For this reason, I have advised him [the Kaiser] to renounce all his plans regarding Morocco. So long as the Morocco question is unsettled, we shall have England ranged on the side of France.' 'You know that I sincerely wish peace. We have nothing to gain by a victory and, in case we fail, we shall lose much. Time is working on our side. Every ten years adds to our strength as compared with that of our rivals. You cannot conceive what a prodigious force our national economic expansion is. What object have we in fighting? We have no need to go to war. We do not want to go to war, and if we do not provoke a war, no one will attack us. The Republican government of France is essentially pacifist. The English do not want war. So far as Russia is concerned, she cannot measure arms with us with any prospect of success.' On my way back from Brussels, I stopped at Berlin to call on my friend Kiderlen. Our conversation turned upon the relations between Germany and England. He repeated to me again that he wanted to reach an agreement with that country. 'But if you wish an agreement with England,' I said, 'why don't you have some tacit understanding regarding your navy? You're too intelligent not to know that England will never permit herself to be outranked by Germany.' 'I want to arrange for precisely the settlement of which you speak, but I have not succeeded,' he replied with evident bitterness. 'I have argued just what you are arguing. I have said these things to Tirpitz.' 'And then?' 'I have not been able to convince him.' 'But the Kaiser?' 'He sides with Tirpitz.' Then he repeated his assurance that, in spite of all opposition, he was doing everything to reach an agreement with England. [The following article is a review of a collection of essays entitled The Evolution of World Peace, edited by F. S. Marvin.] From The London Times Literary Supplement, July 21 THIS Volume, which raises a host of interesting and some ultimate questions organizes an appeal to history for a verdict as to the goal of human evolution, with the aid of a number of able writers and students, some conspicuous for their knowledge, others for their idealism, and all deeply concerned for the welfare of the League of Nations our great contemporary adventure in the better organization of world-politics. Evolution goes its own pace a very slow one; and though it is true that the hand of man is now on the steeringwheel, there is little reason to suppose that his foot is on the accelerator. Festina lente is a good motto in every department of affairs, and of all achievements deserving our pursuit, peace is the last that can be taken with a run. The material conditions, the attitude of mind favorable to it cannot be too frequently studied, and we can imagine nothing more helpful than the organization of conferences and symposia, where persons of influence may exchange views and, temporarily breathing an atmosphere saturated with this greatest of all projects, emerge to spread abroad a contagion of sanity and good-will. But there is a distinction between the written and the spoken word. The effect of the essays Mr. Marvin has collected, when they were delivered as lectures at Woodbrooke, must have been quite different from that of the cold print before us. In their published form they bid for permanence and provoke a kind of criticism which else would not VOL. 310-NO. 4027 arise. Does a publication of this kind, we have been led to wonder, advance the interests of the League? Does it, above all, make a clear enough demarcation between the spirit of inquiry and the desire of the ideal? It gives us, on the one hand, sketches of great periods of history, the Pax Romana, the Papacy of Innocent III, the French Revolution, the Settlement of Vienna, endeavoring to explain each of these periods in the light of the ideal of peace which was in different ways common to them all, and to suggest why the failure of its accomplishment in the past is no proof of its impossibility in the future. That could not be done in twenty pages, and, knowing it could not, the authors seem to have suffered discouragement, and one after another to have lost their way. It gives us, on the other hand, certain general ideas as to the method in which history should be conceived and taught in the interests of international good feeling; we are told that 'the schools are the engine-rooms in which power is created to drive the machinery of the League of Nations' - a doubtful proposition; and then in comes Mr. H. G. Wells, brandishing a world Utopia and severely announcing, like the Queen of Hearts at the croquet match, that, if universal peace is not made in next to no time, it will be a case of heads off all round. For ourselves, as we have suggested, we have little faith in a raging and tearing propaganda where peace is concerned, and suspect that those of our friends who tend to such a policy have 651 been misled by some will-o'-the-wisp, itself, perhaps, the product of shaken nerves. So let us begin quite at the beginning and frankly ask ourselves, if peace is desirable, in what sense it really is to be desired. The mind instinctively associates the word with a perfect state; amid the cares and turmoil of this world men long for the peace of heaven; we believe of our dead that they are living, and our prayer for them is that they may 'rest in peace.' Yet we have no experience of a life that is not a balance of forces, that is not based on contention and antagonism, and we know of few joys comparable to that of the struggle against odds in which, while we struggle, we still hope for victory. Are there then to be no further victories for us? Must we remain forever content with the limited achievement of our brief life here? It seems improbable; and except to those whom the world has wearied and overborne, it must surely seem quite unattractive, too. Indeed, to ask for peace in this sense is perhaps not very different from asking for extinction; it is, as the poet reminds us, the counsel of despair. Sleepe after toyle, port after stormy seas, periods of history. They are not the periods to which we look for inspiration. Formative periods in the history of our race have, alas! been associated with violence and bloodshed; only too often in the past the leaders of civilization have taken one another by the throat, as the nations of Europe still incline to do, while peace has dwelt among people, who knew of nothing worth fighting for, like certain inhabitants of South America to-day. There is no danger of the general establishment of a peace of this kind, which, if established, would deprive human nature of its best features. But there is serious danger of our allowing the thought of it, like a phantom, to disturb our vision: there is serious danger that an unacknowledged love of emptiness may sap the constructive energy through which alone a victorious fullness of human life can be attained. For, peace being an ideal, it is much easier to see what is inconsistent with it than to see what it consists of, what its positive qualities are to be. We can best illustrate our point by some observations on Mr. Wells's handling of his 'World Utopia.' He begins his essay by asking what is meant by a Ease after warre, death after life does greatly Utopia and defining it in a peculiar please. If we remove from life all thought of the antagonist to be faced and vanquished, it has no further call to effort, and there remains for our consolation nothing but a philosophical abstraction. Such too often is the heavenly peace to which we are asked to look forward; and is not our conception of peace on earth taken frequently on the same mould? Is it not mainly a negative peace: absence of rivalries, effacement of differences, fusion of particularities and individualities in a vague general good? Peace more or less after that pattern has been attained over large portions of the earth's surface at various manner. He says that the Utopian is simply the practical man, in this sense: that, if a man is going to build a house, he first makes a sketch plan of the building, and, a fortiori, if we are going to remodel the world, we must have our plan, in other words, our Utopia, before us. Utopia, he goes on, once meant Nowhere, since Utopians, being critics of the existing state of things, did not wish to be offensive to their neighbors; but that is all changed, and now ‘Utopia has to be getting to business in international affairs; it has to take off its fancy dress and speak quite plainly.' The fallacy of this seems to lie in its failure to discriminate between life and its parts, in the belief that a kind of ac |