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Page 7
If only he could rise from that destroying chair, if only he could fling
off his vulgar friendships, if only he could trust himself to his
vision, if only he could believe once again passionately in truth, and
justice, and goodness, and the soul of the British people!
One wonders if the angels in heaven will ever forgive his silence at a
time when the famished children of Austria, many of them born with no
bones, were dying like flies at the shrivelled breasts of their starving
mothers. One wonders if the historian sixty years hence will be able to
forgive him his rebuff to the first genuine democratic movement in
Germany during the war. His responsibility to God and to man is enormous
beyond reckoning. Only the future can decide his place here and
hereafter. It is a moral universe, and, sooner or later, the judgments
of God manifest themselves to the eyes of men.
One seems to see in him an illustrious example both of the value and
perils of emotionalism. What power in the world is greater, controlled
by moral principle? What power so dangerous, when moral earnestness
ceases to inspire the feelings?
Before the war he did much to quicken the social conscience throughout
the world; at the outbreak of war he was the very voice of moral
indignation; and during the war he was the spirit of victory; for all
this, great is our debt to him. But he took upon his shoulders a
responsibility which was nothing less than the future of civilization,
and here he trusted not to vision and conscience but to compromise,
makeshift, patches, and the future of civilization is still dark indeed.
This I hope may be said on his behalf when he stands at the bar of
history, that the cause of his failure to serve the world as he might
have done, as Gladstone surely would have done, was due rather to a
vulgarity of mind for which he was not wholly responsible than to any
deliberate choice of a cynical partnership with the powers of darkness.
LORD CARNOCK
LORD CARNOCK, 1ST BARON (ARTHUR NICOLSON, 11TH BART.)
Born, 1849. Educ.: Rugby and Oxford; in Foreign Office, 1870-74;
Secretary to Earl Granville, 1872-74; Embassy at Berlin, 1874-76;
at Pekin, 1876-78; Charg�, Athens, 1884-85; Teheran, 1885-88;
Consul-General, Budapest, 1888-93; Embassy, Constantinople, 1894;
Minister, Morocco, 1895-1904; Ambassador, Madrid, 1904-5;
Ambassador, Russia, 1905-10; Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs,
1910-16. Author of the _History of the German Constitution_, 1873.
[Illustration: LORD CARNOCK]
CHAPTER II
LORD CARNOCK
_"Usually the greatest boasters are the smallest workers. The deep
rivers pay a larger tribute to the sea than shallow brooks, and yet
empty themselves with less noise."_--SECKER.
One evening in London I mentioned to a man well versed in foreign
affairs that I was that night meeting Lord Carnock at dinner. "Ah!" he
exclaimed, "the man who made the war."
I mentioned this remark to Lord Carnock. He smiled and made answer,
"What charming nonsense!" I asked him what he thought was in my friend's
mind. "Oh, I see what he meant," was the answer; "but it is a wild mind
that would say any one man made the war." Later, after some remarks
which I do not feel myself at liberty to repeat, he said: "Fifty years
hence I think a historian will find it far more difficult than we do now
to decide who made the war."
If Lord Carnock were to write his memoirs, not only would that volume
help the historian to follow the immediate causes of the war to one
intelligible origin, but it would also afford the people of England an
opportunity of seeing the conspicuous difference between a statesman of
the old school and a politician of these latter days.
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