Germany's ambitions, precisely as, according to their political colour,
they had been divided over Tariff Reform or Home Rule for Ireland.
The Liberal Press had jeered at the hair-raising fears of the
Conservative Press, and the latter had answered the jeers by more
ferocious attacks upon German diplomacy and by more determined
efforts to make bad blood between the two nations. The Liberal
Press had dwelt lovingly upon the brotherly sentiment of the German
people for their English cousins. The Conservative Press had
searched out the inflammatory speeches of the war lords and the
junker politicians. It had seemed to the man in the street a
controversy as remote from the actual interests of his own life--as
remote from the suburban garden in which he grew his roses or from
the golf links on which he spent his Saturday afternoons as a
discussion on the canals of Mars. Now and again, in moments of
political excitement, he had taken sides and adopted newspaper
phrases as his own, declaring with an enormous gravity which he did
not really feel that "The German Fleet was a deliberate menace to our
naval supremacy," or joining in the chorus of "We want eight and we
won't wait," or expressing his utter contempt for "all this militarism,"
and his belief in the "international solidarity" of the new democracy.
But there never entered his inmost convictions that the day might
come during his own lifetime when he--a citizen of Suburbia--might
have to fight for his own hearthside and suffer the intolerable horrors
of war while the roses in his garden were trampled down in mud and
blood, and while his own house came clattering down like a pack of
cards--the family photographs, the children's toys, the piano which he
had bought on the hire system, all the household gods which he
worshipped, mixed up in a heap of ruin--as afterwards at
Scarborough and Hartlepool, Ipswich, and Southend.