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The Russians felt those humiliations as a gentleman would feel the bullying of an upstart. Lord Carnock was at the Foreign Office in July, 1914. He alone knew that Russia would fight. For the rest of mankind, certainly for the German Kaiser, it was to be another bloodless humiliation of the Russian Bear. Admiral von Tirpitz wanted war: Bethmann-Hollweg did not.
This work of his, which helped so materially to save the world, was done with clean hands. It was never the work of a war-monger. No foreigner ever exercised so great an influence in Russia, and this influence had its power in his moral nature. I had this from M. Sazonoff himself. Such a man as Lord Carnock could not make any headway in English political life.
If Lord Carnock were to write his memoirs, not only would that volume help the historian to follow the immediate causes of the war to one intelligible origin, but it would also afford the people of England an opportunity of seeing the conspicuous difference between a statesman of the old school and a politician of these latter days.
I am not sure that Lord Carnock was not the only statesman in Europe who possessed this knowledge the knowledge on which everything hung. It is easy for thoughtless people, either in their hatred or love of Bolshevism, to forget that the old Russia saved France from destruction and made a greater sacrifice of her noblest life than any other nation in the great struggle.
He erred with that great number of educated Germans who thought the sword had only to be rattled a little more loudly in the scabbard for Russia to weaken, and for Germany to gain, without cost, the supreme object of her policy an increasing ascendancy in the Balkans. But this time Russia was ready, and this time Lord Carnock knew Russia would fight.
The first Russian armies, composed of the very flower of her manhood, fought with a matchless heroism, and, so fighting, delivered France from an instant defeat. Lord Carnock may justly be said to have prepared Russia for this ordeal for a true friend helps as well as gives good advice.
But it would be a total misjudgment of his character which saw in this great work a clever stroke of diplomatic skill. Lord Carnock was inspired by a moral principle. He saw that Russia was tempting the worst passions of Germany by her weakness. He felt this weakness to be unworthy of a country whose intellectual achievements were so great as Russia's. He had no enmity at all against the Germans.
Scottish ecclesiastical historian, b. at Perth, s. of John R., one of the Scottish Reformers, was minister of Carnock in Fife, and a leading opponent of Episcopacy. His Historie of the Kirk of Scotland, 1558-1637, left by him in manuscript, was printed in 1842 for the Wodrow Society. It is an original authority for the period.
Author of the History of the German Constitution, 1873. "Usually the greatest boasters are the smallest workers. The deep rivers pay a larger tribute to the sea than shallow brooks, and yet empty themselves with less noise." One evening in London I mentioned to a man well versed in foreign affairs that I was that night meeting Lord Carnock at dinner. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "the man who made the war."
William Brace, certainly of Mr. Clynes, is sufficient for the crudest of our home needs, sufficient for the daily bread of our political life; but who can doubt that English politics would be lifted into a higher and altogether purer region if men like Lord Carnock were at the head of things, to provide for the spirit of man as well as for his stomach?
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