Great Britain declared war on Germany at eleven o'clock last night. An ultimatum was sent to Germany during the day, requiring assurances that the neutrality of Belgium would be respected, a reply being requested by midnight. The reply was in effect a rejection of the British demand, whereupon war was declared.

All controversy therefore is now at an end. Our front is united.

A little more knowledge, a little more time on this side, more patience, and a sounder political principle on the other side would have saved us from the greatest calamity that anyone living has known. It will be a war in which we risk almost everything of which we are proud, and in which we stand to gain nothing.

Even those who have worked for the war will enter upon it without enthusiasm, and amongst the majority of our countrymen the thought of it has aroused the deepest misgivings and the most poignant regret. Some day we shall all regret it.

We ourselves have contended for the neutrality of England to the utmost of our power and with a deep conviction that we were doing a patriotic duty. The memory of those efforts will not weaken our resolution now, but rather strengthen it.

Some time the responsibility for one of the greatest errors in our history will have to be fixed but that time is not now. Now there is nothing for Englishmen to do but stand together and help by every means in their power to the attainment of our common object – an early and decisive victory over Germany.

Our part in the war, for the present at any rate, is intended to be purely naval, and it is greatly to be desired that it should remain so. For the present we imagine, and we should hope later also, it is unlikely that anything will be done on land by this country. The strategy of the German army is exactly what it has always been expected, to concentrate her whole offensive force against France in the hope of crushing her before Russia is ready to strike.

The Russian mobilisation, by reason of the great distances and fewness of the railways, is exceedingly slow.

The French have made the whole frontier between Alsace and Luxemburg a continuous chain of forts designed to hold the German attack in check, and it is on order to avoid the delays and awful cost in life of forcing their way past the forts that the Germans have violated the neutrality of Belgium and Luxemburg.

In two months or three months at the outside we shall probably know how it will end.