The Spectator, 29 August 1914:
NO decent or self-respecting person will ever indulge in a word of recrimination even against those men who supported Germany and German aspirations till the beginning of the war, who deprecated any attempt to make adequate military provision for war in these islands, and who denounced as criminal, and even inhuman, the distrust of the governing class in Germany when it was publicly set forth. Time has proved those who held these views to be wrong, and they are now, as a rule, the last men in the world to entertain them; but their forced disillusionment, though it may prove them to have been wrong in fact, does not of course in the least prove them to have been wrong at heart. Their error was in thinking too well of human nature. They were deceived, no doubt, but deceived by artful pleas which appealed to their generosity and better feelings, and no true man will think the worse of them on that account.
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