"It is disturbing that, while Hobson and Brailsford were so penetrating about the present, they were wrong about the future... Brailsford...wrote...in March 1914: "the dangers which forced our ancestors into European coalitions and Continental wars have gone never to return"... It may be unfair to judge any writer in the light of what came after. Yet men with far less of Brailsford's knowledge and intellectual equipment foresaw the conflict of 1914, and even the shape that it would take. The true vision of the future was with Robert Blatchford, when he wrote his pamphlet, Germany and England, for The Daily Mail. This is a sad confession. Hobson and Brailsford are our sort. We think like them, judge like them, admire their style and their moral values. We should be ashamed to write like Blatchford, though he was in fact the greatest popular journalist since Cobbett. Yet he was right, and they were wrong. Their virtues were their undoing. They expected reason to triumph. He knew that men love Power above all else. This, not Imperialism, is the besetting sin."
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A. J. P. Taylor, Essays in English History (1976), pp. 173-174
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Blatchford
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Robert Blatchford
Robert Blatchford (March 17 1851 – December 17 1943) was a socialist campaigner, journalist and author in the United Kingdom. He was a prominent atheist and opponent of eugenics.
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