the great war and modernist poetry precedent and convention, by partisan tradition and policy principle, they ought to
haveopposed. This contradiction, which locates one of the major value watersheds
in the traditions of liberal modernity, provides the formative ground for the most
important modernist verse of the occasion.
The lines of opposition in the 1914 crisis may be drawn from the major division
within the Liberal Party on the question of war in general. On one side, the memory
of the great Victorian Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone preserved the ethic and
method of moral rationalism. This liberal tradition of Public Reason maintained
that armed force required an informed act of logical conscience, a choice reasoned
freely and in public and in accord with the loftiest moral values.^4 On the other side,
Liberal imperialists proceeded under the operative standards ofrealpolitik.Inthis
way of thinking, the British military served as an instrument of security: its power
could be parleyed through agreements with other European nations; these alliances
could require involvement in hostilities, but these engagements could hardly be
appealed to the codes of Gladstonian probity—the imperialists tended to negotiate
English interests within a frame of global reference that put practical or local
advantage and commercial concerns first.^5 Since 1906, the most powerful positions
within the majority government were held by Liberal imperialists—Prime Minister
H. H. Asquith and his Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey—but the logic of foreign
policy was still controlled in its public discussions by Gladstonian protocols. In
this situation, Asquith and Grey needed to keep private their alliance building
with France and Russia. Officially, they continued to deny the existence of these
‘secret agreements’ (so dubbed by an already suspicious public), at least until early
August 1914, when the network of European connections was activated.^6 At this
moment, as Britain paused before the awful prospect of a Continental war, these
rival traditions within Liberalism were evidenced in tensions that anticipated, in
substantial detail, the major crisis that this developing event would present to
partisan—and national—life.
The Foreign Secretary’s speech before Parliament on 3 August provided the
loftiest expression of the Liberal rationale for war, arguing the moral cause of
a righteous defence of France in view of the imminent German incursion into
(^4) The best representation of this salient value and its comprehensive practice in Western political
tradition comes from John Rawls,Political Liberalism(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996),
esp. pp. xxiv, xxvi–xxviii, xxx, 47–59, 212–27.
(^5) A good contemporary reference on the ideas and values of political and intellectual Liberalism
comes from L. T. Hobhouse,Liberalism(London: Williams & Norgate, 1910), a volume aimed at the
broad-based readership of the series in which it appeared, the Home University Library of Modern
Knowledge. The rival values and practice of Gladstonian and imperial Liberalism may be found on pp.
104 and 221.
(^6) The existence of these ‘secret agreements’ and the influence they exerted on British policy and
action constitute the subject of the major expos ́e by the founding director of the Union of Democratic
Control (of foreign policy), E. D. Morel, inTruth and the War(London: National Labour Press, 1916),
esp. 35–41, 273–300. A Liberal MP who resigned his seat in protest at the outbreak of war, Morel used
his influence to access government archives to provide material support for his case.