Mr. Austen Chamberlain also spoke frankly on the same topic
last Saturday night, but happily without emulating the ineptitude of his colleague. His speech, indeed, made out as good a case as could be made out for anything so humiliating, so in- jurious, nay, so ridiculous, as our confessed inability to say " No " to Germany when she asked to be allowed to encumber us with her alliance,—an alliance which everybody but the Government knew must bring in its train unpopularity at home and distrust abroad. He met the question, Why did we not re- fuse overtures for concerted action P by retorting that he had noticed no criticism anywhere of our co-operation with Italy. "The whole of the criticism was directed against our co-opera- tion with Germany. It would be idle for him to affect to ignore the unpopularity of that co-operation, or to pretend surprise that it was not very popular in this country. The events of the last few years were still too recent in our memories. Un- fortunate utterances in the German Press and elsewhere sunk deep into the minds and hearts of Englishmen, and they had created a feeling which it might take time to overcome." That is all true; but it did not need a Cabinet Minister to point it out. As we have said elsewhere, the Government and their apologists seem to think that "the Venezuelan mess" was due to physical causes and not to their own blundering,— that, in fact, they were caught in a thunder-storm, not that they plunged headlong into a bog owing to their own carelessness.
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