Diplomat Dead

At his home in London, died Sir William Edward Goschen.

Seventysix, Sir Edward was a diplomatist of the old school. In 1869 he entered the diplomatic service and in the 45 years between 1869 and 1914 he held posts at Madrid, Buenos Aires, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Constantinople, Peking, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Petrograd, Washington, Belgrade, Vienna, Berlin.

It was at the latter capital that the veteran diplomatist tacked fame to his flagstaff. He asked Herr von Jagow, German Foreign Minister in 1914, whether Germany would refrain from violating Belgium's neutrality.

The German Foreign Minister replied that the neutrality had already been violated upon grounds of military expediency. He said it was a matter of life and death for Germany.

Sir Edward then delivered the famed British ultimatum.

Subsequently, Sir Edward saw the agitated Imperial Chancellor, Dr. Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, who said that Britain was going to make war on a kindred nation just for the sake of the word "neutrality," just for the sake of "a scrap of paper." From that moment the phrase, "a scrap of paper," became an Allied slogan, fuel for the fire of warfare. It was Sir Edward Goschen who, in reporting the Chancellor's words, wrote himself into history, because the British Empire went to war to uphold the sanctity of inter national contracts and for other very good but less moving reasons. When the news that Britain had declared war on Germany became known in Berlin, an unruly mob assembled outside the British Embassy. The Kaiser apologized for the disturbances, said that they plainly showed the state of feeling of the German people. He asked the Ambassador to tell King George that he was very proud of his titles of Field Marshal in the British Army and of Admiral in the British Navy, but that he must now divest himself of them.

Sir Edward can hardly be said to have determined Britain's attitude toward the violation of Belgium's neutrality by the Germans in 1914, but he played an important part when he indignantly protested against Dr. von Bethmann-Hollweg's assertion that the Belgian Treaty of Neutrality was "a scrap of paper," and when he asserted stingingly that Britain would defend Belgium because she had contracted to do so.