The time when this struggle might
have been averted or won by talk is long past. During the hundred years
before the war we have not talked much, or listened much, to the
Germans. For fifty of those years at least the head of waters that has
now been let loose in a devastating flood over Europe was steadily
accumulating; but we paid little attention to it. People sometimes speak
of the negotiations of the twelve days before the war as if the whole
secret and cause of the war could be found there; but it is not so.
Statesmen, it is true, are the keepers of the lock-gates, but those
keepers can only delay, they cannot prevent an inundation that has great
natural causes. The world has in it evil enough, and darkness enough.
But it is not so bad and so dark that a slip in diplomacy, a careless
word, or an impolite gesture, can instantaneously, as if by magic,
involve twenty million men in a struggle to the death. It is only
clever, conceited men, proud of their neat little minds, who think that
because they cannot fathom the causes of the war, it might easily have
been prevented.
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