The mere facts of the story about the present European conflagration are quite as easy to tell.
Before we go on to the deeper things which make this war the most sincere war of human history, it is easy to answer the question of why England came to be in it at all; as one asks how a man fell down a coal hole, or failed to keep an appointment. Facts are not the whole truth. But facts are facts, and in this case the facts are few and simple.
Prussia, France, and England had all promised not to invade Belgium, because it was the safest way of invading France. But Prussia promised that if she might break in through her own broken promise and ours she would break in and not steal. In other words, we were offered at the same instant a promise of faith in the future and a proposal of perjury in the present.
Those interested in human origins may refer to an old Victorian writer of English, who in the last and most restrained of his historical essays wrote of Frederick the Great, the founder of this unchanging Prussian policy.

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