Excerpt from British War Finance 1914-15 The European war of 1914 took Foreign Ministers, diplomatists, and politicians generally even more by sur prise than the franco-german War of 1870 had done. However minutely we search through the newspaper files of the preceding months, we Shall find little or no forewarning of the impending calamity. True, there were vague presentiments of a coming Armageddon, but even these were less acute than they had previously been. Our relations with Germany had been materially improved by Sir Edward Grey's settlement of several long standing difficulties, the Bagdad railway question among them. By a curious coincidence, the Foreign Office vote came before the House of Commons on the day after the assassination of the Austrian heir-apparent and his consort at Serajevo. Sir Edward prefaced his statement in moving the vote with an expression of sympathy with the Austrian people and their venerable Sovereign at the tragic loss they had suffered. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.