It will be said—it has indeed been already said—by way of excuse for the reticence of the Government with regard to the intentions, which German statesmen revealed to Lord Haldane, at Berlin, in February 1912—that by keeping back from the country the knowledge which members of the Cabinet possessed, they thereby prevented an outbreak of passion and panic which might have precipitated war. This may be true or untrue; it can neither be proved nor controverted; but at any rate it was not in accordance with the principle of trusting the people; nor would it have prevented the Government and their supporters—when war broke out—from making amends to Lord Roberts and others whom, on grounds of high policy, they had felt themselves obliged, in the past to rebuke unjustly and to discredit without warrant in the facts. This course was not impossible. Peel, a very proud man, made amends to Cobden, and his memory does not stand any the lower for it.


With regard to those journalists and private politicians whose mistakes were not altogether their own fault—being due in part at least, to the concealment of the true facts which the Government had practised—it would not have been in the least wounding to their honour to express regret, that they had been unwittingly the means of misleading the people, and traducing those who were endeavouring to lead {348} it right. In their patriotic indignation some of these same journalists and politicians had overstepped the limits of what is justifiable in party polemics.

t the Military Colleges, because it sought to face the European situation frankly, and to work out in the lecture-room the strategical and tactical consequences which, in case of war, might be forced upon us by our relations with France and Russia. It would have done these high-minded journalists no harm in the eyes of their fellow-countrymen, had they acknowledged frankly that when in former days they had denounced the words of Lord Roberts as 'wicked' and his interpretation of the situation as inspired by "the crude lusts and fears which haunt the unimaginative soldier's brain"—when they had publicly denounced as 'a Staff College Cabal' teachers who were only doing their duty—they had  been guilty of a cruel misjudgment.


It is not a little remarkable that in 1912—indeed from 1905 to 1914—Lord Roberts, who, according to the Nation, possessed but 'an average Tory intellect,' should have trusted the people, while a democratic Government could not bring itself to do so. The Cabinet, which knew the full measure of the danger, concealed it out of a mistaken notion of policy. Their henchmen on the platform and in the press did not know the full measure of the danger. They acted either from natural prejudice, or official inspiration—possibly from a mixture of both—when they made light of the danger and held up to scorn any one who called attention to it. The whole body of respectable, word-worshipping, well-to-do Liberals and Cs, whom nothing could stir out of {349} their indifference and scepticism, disapproved most strongly of having the word 'danger' so much as mentioned in their presence. The country would to-day forgive all of these their past errors more easily if, when the crisis came, they had acted a manly part and had expressed regret. But never a word of the sort from any of these great public characters!