The Facts of the Case

Unless we are all mad, there is at the back of the most bewildering
business a story: and if we are all mad, there is no such thing as madness.
If I set a house on fire, it is quite true that I may illuminate many other
people's weaknesses as well as my own. It may be that the master of the
house was burned because he was drunk; it may be that the mistress of the
house was burned because she was stingy, and perished arguing about the
expense of the fire-escape. It is, nevertheless, broadly true that they
both were burned because I set fire to their house. That is the story of
the thing. The mere facts of the story about the present European
conflagration are quite as easy to tell.

Before we go on to the deeper things which make this war the most sincere
war of human history, it is easy to answer the question of why England came
to be in it at all, as one asks how a man fell down a coal-hole, or failed
to keep an appointment. Facts are not the whole truth. But facts are facts,
and in this case the facts are few and simple. Prussia, France, and
England had all promised not to invade Belgium. Prussia proposed to invade
Belgium, because it was the safest way of invading France. But Prussia
promised that if she might break in, through her own broken promise and
ours, she would break in and not steal. In other words, we were offered at
the same instant a promise of faith in the future and a proposal of perjury
in the present. Those interested in human origin may refer to an old
Victorian writer of English, who, in the last and most restrained of his
historical essays, wrote of Frederick the Great, the founder of this
unchanging Prussian policy. After describing how Frederick broke the
guarantee he had signed on behalf of Maria Theresa, he then describes how
Frederick sought to put things straight by a promise that was an insult.
"If she would but let him have Silesia, he would, he said, stand by her
against any power which should try to deprive her of her other dominions,
as if he was not already bound to stand by her, or as if his new promise
could be of more value than the old one." That passage was written by
Macaulay, but so far as the mere contemporary facts are concerned, it might
have been written by me.

Upon the immediate logical and legal origin of the English interest there
can be no rational debate. There are some things so simple that one can
almost prove them with plans and diagrams, as in Euclid. One could make a
kind of comic calendar of what would have happened to the English
diplomatist if he had been silenced every time by Prussian diplomacy.
Suppose we arrange it in the form of a kind of diary.

July 24. Germany invades Belgium.

July 25. England declares war.

July