Successful^ Merely Right 



in the Foreign Minister's decision. On August i he 

 had written: 



The greatest calamity in history is upon us a calamity so 

 vast that our senses are benumbed with horror. Every step 

 at this hour may be irrevocable. The avalanche trembles on 

 the brink, and a touch may send it shattering to the abyss. 



Parliament having declared war, Morley, Burns, Cabinet 

 and Trevelyan at once resigned from the Cabinet. 

 Burns told me he had read "The Human Harvest," 

 and had made up his mind that he "would take no 

 part in any war, for any purpose," as the effects on 

 the manhood of England would be so terribly dis- 

 astrous. Borrowing friends having worn out his copy 

 of the book, he now asked for another with my auto- 

 graph. 



A few days later Norman Angell, fully alive to 

 the awful significance of the catastrophe which had 

 overtaken civilization, gathered about him a group 

 of friends and disciples at Salisbury House, near the 

 Strand. Then in memorable words, "We were not 

 successful we were merely right," he summed up 

 the situation. 1 



In a farewell visit to friends in the Liberal Club, 

 Prince Lichnowsky, the German Ambassador, had sky 



1 In his recent volume, "The Next War," Will Irwin writes as follows: 

 "From the pacifist literature which preceded our entrance into the European 

 War, three books stand out in memory. Jean Bloch, a Pole, maintained that 

 war could not be; the horrors of modern warfare were so great that men would 

 not long face them. Events discredited Bloch; we found unexpected reservoirs 

 of valor in the human spirit. Every week, along the great line, bodies of men 

 performed acts of sacrifice which made Thermopylae, the Alamo, and the Charge 

 of the Light Brigade seem poor and spiritless. Norman Angell, writing from 

 the economic viewpoint, predicted not that war could not be, but that it would 

 not pay. The victor would lose as well as the vanquished. Events so far have 

 tended to vindicate Norman AngelPs view; perhaps the next ten years may 

 vindicate him entirely. The third work, less known than the others, came out 

 of Armageddon unshaken. It is Dr. David Starr Jordan's 'War and the Breed.' " 



C639 3 



