quiet them; the consternation which would have been caused in Paris by the presence of Sir Edward Grey at Kiel can only be imagined. The fact that the British statesmen entertained so little apprehension of a German attack may possibly be a reflection on their judgment; yet Colonel House's visit has a great historical value, for the experience afterward convinced him that Great Britain had no part in bringing on the European war, and that Germany was solely responsible. It certainly put the Wilson Administration right on this all-important point, when the great storm broke.

The most vivid recollection which the British statesmen whom Colonel House met retain of his visit, was his consternation at the spirit that had confronted him everywhere in Germany. The four men most interested-Sir Edward Grey, Sir William Tyrrell, Ambassador Page, and Colonel House-met at luncheon in the American Embassy a few days after President Wilson's emissary had returned from Berlin. Colonel House could talk of little except the preparations for war which were manifest on every hand.

PRINCE LICHNOWSKY

"I feel as though I had been living near a mighty electric dynamo," Colonel House told his friends. "The whole of Germany is charged with electricity. Everybody's nerves are tense. It needs only a spark to set the whole thing off."

The "spark" came two weeks afterward with the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand.

"It is all a bad business," Colonel House wrote to Page when war broke out, "and just think how near we came to making such a catastrophe impossible! If England had moved a little faster and had let me go back to Ger(A fourth chapter will be

many, the thing, perhaps, could have been done."

To which Page at once replied:

"No, no, no-no power on earth could have prevented it. The German militarism, which is the crime of the last fifty years, has been working for this for twenty-five years. It is the logical result of their spirit and enterprise and doctrine. It had to come. But, of course, they chose the wrong time and the wrong issue. Militarism has no judgment. Don't let your conscience be worried. You did all that any mortal man could do. But nobody could have done anything effective.

"We've got to see to it that this system doesn't grow up again. That's all." published in November)

T

HE Right Honorable Arthur Meighen, Prime Minister of Canada, has recently focused upon himself the interest of his fellow NorthAmericans to the south of the Canadian border, by his leadership in opposing the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance at the Conference of British Prime Ministers in London. Mr. Meighen is not new to the arena of international politics, however. During the Imperial War Conference of 1918 he was associated with Sir Robert Borden as one of the three Canadian representatives at that important gathering, and the experience gained there peculiarly fitted him for the later rôle he has been called upon to play.

Mr. Meighen's manifest understanding of international problems, especially those which relate to North America and the Pacific, may have occasioned some slight surprise in certain parts of the Empire and the United States, but not in Canada. Among his own people, Mr. Meighen is known to have been a keen student of the affairs of the British Empire, and to possess clearly defined views on the relations between its various component parts. In the session of the Canadian Parliament in 1912-13, he shared in the important debate on Canada's relations to the then naval problem of the Empire, and delivered notable addresses on the subject throughout the Dominion. He was a member of the Cabinet during the War, when Canada's relations to the Empire and to the other nations of the world were being enlarged and emphasized.

Just before he left for this Conference of Prime Ministers, he delivered an address in the House of Commons on what he considered Canada's attitude at that Conference should be; and that address was accepted by all classes of the people as being eminently satisfactory. Having a full and intimate knowledge of Mr.

Meighen's record and opinions, Canada felt that her relations with the other British nations were safe in his hands. The Manitoba Free Press, the leading Liberal journal of western Canada, which cannot be described as politically friendly to Mr. Meighen, said at that time: "He goes to London not as the leader of a political party, but as the representative of Canada; and as such, he carries with him the best wishes and, in a large manner we think, the confidence of the people of Canada."

At the Conference he took a prominent part and proved himself quite the equal of General Smuts of South Africa, and Mr. Hughes of Australia, as an exponent of Britannic foreign policy, present and future.

It quickly became apparent that the most vital aspect of the Conference was that which opened up the problems revolving around the first item on the agenda-namely, the question of the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance; and in the deliberations that followed, Mr. Meighen played a remarkable and even a decisive part. He recognized indeed the desirability of continued friendship and coöperation with Japan; who has such an inevitably important place in the Far East and whose most thoughtful and far-seeing elements are genuinely anxious to play a worthy rôle in the community of nations; but he urged that an exclusive alliance or arrangement between only two of the Powers interested in the Pacific and Far East had become obsolete and inadequate as a means of regulating the international politics of that region, and that for such an arrangement there should be substituted a wider understanding, based upon the more modern and effective system of free and full consultation and conference between all the Powers vitally interested. In short, he proposed that the British Empire should lend its weight to the principle of a Conference