While the voluble William continued to vociferate "Peace, Peace!" he plotted "War, War!" in his heart. He went on unceasingly to swell his Army, to strengthen its equipment, and above all to encourage those who were diffusing the militarist poison in every German mind. As if it were not enough for Germans to be taught that they must be ready against the time when they should go forth to new victories on land, William breathed into them the dream that they ought also to dominate the sea. "Our future lies upon the water," he announced, at the opening of the new port of Stettin in 1890; words listened to with only a passing wonder, but which prove how early in his career the Kaiser was coquetting with the temptation of world-dominion. Thereupon the keels of the first German warships were laid down; the German Navy League was organized to arouse the enthusiasm of the Empire; the glory of embarking on vast colonial enterprises was preached; and the ulterior purpose which a mighty Navy

might serve began to be whispered. By the year 1900 the toast, "The Day," was not only drunk by Army and Navy officers at their mess, but was proposed and cheered at public banquets.

What "Day"? The day on which the Germans should meet and destroy the English Navy, conquer England, shatter the British Empire, and inherit its wealth. That was the aim every German was taught to strive for; and, since we hate those whom we have injured or plot to injure, the German Mendacity Bureau circulated throughout Germany the belief that England, jealous of Germany's commercial success, intended to attack the Fatherland. So the business of teaching hatred of England was deliberately carried on, the black seeds being sown in the minds of little children and watered and nurtured with Teutonic persistence.

But actions speak louder than words, and during all those years when, under the pretense that England was going to attack Ger

many, Germany prepared to attack England, there was no port in the British Empire into which German merchant ships did not sail unhindered, no British dock on which German merchandise was not unloaded without discriminating duties. The Germans boasted, and with reason, of their industrial expansion, unmatched either in rapidity or in volume; they boasted that their goods undersold British goods in London itself; they boasted that they were taking away trade from England in China, in the Far East and in other British dependencies, as well as in other lands, to all of which they gained access through British ports. These boasts were founded on facts. And yet the Germans declared almost in the same breath that British "Navalism" word they coined to dupe the unthinkingprevented German industry from reaching a market and German commerce from having its share of the world's trade. In the long list of German lies few surpasses this in shamelessness. It would seem that to lie successfully

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one must be civilized. The German exercises in this art have the unconscious naïveté of the semi-savage, who fails to perceive either that he contradicts himself, or that his deceit is patent to his intended victim.

The favorite German practice of accusing the enemy of intending to do what the Germans themselves were on the point of doing, is another example of this semi-savage naïveté. In war they call it an "offensive defensive," and, since war is at best a relic of barbarism, the trick has its strategic justification; but in diplomacy or in politics its barbaric origin betrays it when it is tried on peoples whose standards are not semi-savage. The Kaiser and his Militarist Ring, however, used it with profit among the Germans themselves. When they wished to increase the Army, they needed only to whisper that Russia was threatening the Fatherland, or that France, stung by some German insult into uttering a fiery word, was growing dangerous and must be guarded against.

Having launched his naval policy, the Kaiser found England a convenient bogy for justifying the immense appropriations which his plans of naval expansion required. And while he added cruiser to cruiser and dreadnought to dreadnought, and reached at last the glory of the superdreadnought, he continued in his addresses to assure the world that the mission of the German Navy was peace. No doubt a great majority of the German people believed his assurances; no doubt, also, they believed that France and Russia and now England, either singly or together, were evolving the designs which the Imperial Ring insinuated against them. The German people have been trained too long to take their information from above, to question its veracity.

To Prussianize Germany; to keep the German military and naval equipment up to the highest pitch of excellence; to imbue the German people, whose obedience was proved past wavering, with such a sense of their supremacy that they would accept as a matter of course