I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to the friends with whom I have studied the problems of policy and defence for some years past. The responsibility for the contents and publication of the present volume is mine alone; but I have used their ideas without hesitation, and have drawn largely upon the notes and memoranda which they drafted for my assistance. I wish also to thank several others—one in chief—for the kindness with which, upon the present occasion, they have given me help and criticism as these pages were passing through the press.

There is also another source to which I wish here gratefully to confess my obligations. During the past five years there have appeared in The Round Table certain articles upon the relations of England with Germany[1] which have been characterised by {xxi} a remarkable degree of prescience and sanity. At a certain point, however, there is a difference between the views expressed in The Round Table and those expressed in the following pages—a difference of stress and emphasis perhaps, rather than of fundamental opinion, but still a difference of some importance. I have dealt with this in the concluding chapter.

I should like to make one other acknowledgment of a different kind. I have known the editor of The National Review from a date long before he assumed his onerous office—from days when we were freshmen together by the banks of the Cam. During a period of upwards of thirty years, I cannot remember that I have ever had the good fortune to see absolutely eye to eye with Mr. Maxse upon any public question. Even now I do not see eye to eye with him. In all probability I never shall. At times his views have been in sharp opposition to my own. But for these very reasons—if he will not resent it as an impertinence—I should like to say here how greatly I respect him for three qualities, which have been none too common among public men in recent times—first, for the clearness with which he grasps and states his beliefs; secondly, for the courageous constancy with which he holds to them through good and evil report; thirdly, for the undeviating integrity of his public career. Next to Lord Roberts, he did more perhaps than any other—though unavailingly—to arouse public opinion to the dangers {xxii} which menaced it from German aggression, to call attention to the national unpreparedness, and to denounce the blindness and indolence which treated warnings with derision.