CHAPTER IX 



GEORGE V KING 



The death of Edward VII was a misfortune for English diplomacy 

 and the peace of Europe. Although in some ways he had launched 

 the Foreign Office on an adventurous course by the two ententes for 

 which he was primarily responsible, that with France about Morocco 

 and that with Russia about Persia, his influence with the Government 

 had been a steadying one, and it is probable that if he had lived another 

 ten years the supreme catastrophe of a European war would have been 

 avoided. He knew what was going on in the various Courts of Europe 

 far better than did our professional diplomatists, and his disappear- 

 ance from their counsels left the supreme direction of our foreign 

 policy uncontrolled in the hands of Grey, whose ignorance of foreign 

 affairs was really astonishing, knowing as he did no foreign language, 

 and having made hardly so much as a holiday tour in Europe. King 

 Edward's successor, whose life had been that of a sailor, knowing the 

 world only as a sailor sees it at the seaport towns where his ship stops 

 to coal — ■ and seaport towns all the world over are alike — and being 

 without any experience of politics, even those of his own country, was 

 quite unable to supply the directing power his father had exerted at 

 times so successfully. Consequently from this point onward, the year 

 191 o, our English policy on the Continent exhibited a series of blunders 

 of the most dangerous kind, leading by a logical sequence in four years' 

 time to England's entanglement in a war, the result of which was not 

 foreseen, and for which no preparation whatever had been made. 

 How all this came about will, I think, be made clear in the following 

 pages. 



"21st May. — Newbuildings. Prince Mohammed Ali, the Khedive's 

 brother, who has been representing the Khedive at the King's funeral, 

 arrived here this afternoon with two of his Egyptian friends to see 

 the horses, having an Arab stud of his own at Cairo. While at tea, 

 when he had seen everything, I asked him about the state of affairs 

 in Egypt. He said they had been going very well until about a year 

 a?o, but owine to the weakness of the Radical Government here had 

 since gone badly. Too much licence, he said, had been allowed to the 

 Press, so that the Government and everybody connected with it had 

 been attacked, and the Prime Minister, Boutros Pasha, had been mur- 



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