THE MISJUDGING OF SIR EDWARD GREY

‘It was quite characteristic of the state of mind of England in the summer of 1914 that Mr. Britling should be mightily concerned about the conflict in Ireland, and almost deliberately negligent of the possibility of a war with Germany.’ The years before 1914 were hardly a golden afternoon of placid contentment. Threats and challenges to Liberal assumptions bristled at home and abroad. Grey's foreign policy, based on a Triple Entente which included Tsarist Russia, seemed to men like Hobson to be ‘radically discordant with the essentials of Liberalism’ (MG, 18 July 1912). The division here, as in the Boer War, was between Radicals and Liberal Imperialists. In Parliament a Foreign Affairs group was set up under Ponsonby and Noel Buxton in November 1911. Its work was complemented by an outside Committee, organised by Hobhouse, of which Courtney became President. Within six months, however, the Committee's initial funds had been exhausted to little effect and it seems to have expired before the end of 1912. Persia was a particularly sore point since here Britain seemed not only to be thwarting nationalist aspirations but to be doing so in collusion with Russia. ‘The situation is unspeakably humiliating’, Hammond confessed to Ponsonby (31 December 1911). The Foreign Policy Committee confidently characterised such evils as ‘the work of a secret diplomacy which committed the country to lines of policy that it did not approve’ (CR, ci, 471). Here, as elsewhere, Radicals diagnosed the problem as one for which they had a standing remedy: more democracy.