Page:The drama of three hundred and sixty-five days.djvu/42

THE DRAMA OF 365 DAYS nations are safeguards of peace, but here, heaven help us, they are dragging us into war."

So general was this sentiment of revolt during the last tragic days that it is commonly understood to have extended to the Cabinet. Six members are said to have opposed war. One of them, a philosopher and historian of high distinction, could not see his way with his colleagues, and retired from their company. Another, who came from the working classes, is understood to have resigned from thought of the sufferings which any war, however justifiable, must inevitably inflict upon the poor. A third, a lawyer in a position of the utmost authority, is believed to have had grave misgivings about our legal right to call Germany to account. And I have heard that a fourth, who had been prominent as a pacifist in the days of an earlier conflict, had written a letter to a colleague as late as the evening of August 1, saying that a war declared merely on grounds of problematical self-interest would create such an outcry in Great Britain as had never been heard here before—leaving us a divided and, therefore, easily vanquished people.

  THE PART CHANCE PLAYED B chance plays the largest part in the drama of life, and accident often confounds the plans of men. Not feeling entirely sure of his letter the  Rh