British Foreign Policy Under Sir Edward Grey PDF Download

Excerpt from The Foreign Policy of Sir Edward Grey 1906-1915 It is a characteristic of British politics that, even in times of crisis, there are always men to be found who will criticize severely their country's action and expound sympathetically the case for their country's enemies. I think we may well be proud of this characteristic. It is one that could only be found in a community which is highly civilized; whose heart is set on honourable dealing and not merely on success, and whose citizens in general trust one another and are free from panic. For these few who protest are not traitors, and no sensible person ever thinks they are. They may be right or wrong on the main issue; their motives may vary from the purest love of justice to divers degrees of prejudice or pigheadedness or personal pique. But they are never guilty, and never seriously suspected, of either treachery or corruption. No government ever persecutes them. No mob seriously maltreats them. They are unpopular, but nothing more. And certainly the present writer would be among the very last to judge any one harshly for being 'the friend of every country but his own.' He has too often been called that name himself, and has been proud of it. He is not going to blame any one for being 'pro-German' in the only sense in which the term can be fairly used; that is, of being anxious to state the case for Germany as clearly and fairly as possible, and to help us to understand our enemies. In the other sense, in the sense of wishing the Germans to win the war, there are, I believe, no pro-Germans among the sane inhabitants of Great Britain. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.