seas and now in desperate combat face the Germans on the flats of Flanders, the plains of Picardy, and the hills of the Woëvre and of the Vosges? To believe this is to deny that the wills and desires of men or nations play any part on this world's stage. It would be sacrilegious to every ideal of liberty and justice to entertain the thought that this is all, and that for this only any single citizen has been called from his peaceful pursuits and sent from his shop or his field to fight, perchance to die, in an unknown land. This act was done by those opposed to Germany; and so, to say this was "the challenge" would suggest that the opponents of Germany were the more ready and anxious for the duel. The true cause of the war is much simpler than this. The true cause of the war is the fact that the powers in Germany which can make war desired ardently to do so, and therefore seized upon this assassination, as a German Socialist expressed it, as a "gift from heaven.' Their desire for war is evident from the previous chapters. It is now possible to show the stages by which they transferred this desire into action.

Let us turn for a moment to the protagonists in this great drama.

The archduke had been the friend of Kaiser William II. How was the latter to receive the news? Let us take the account of a careful if interested witness, Baron Beyens, the Belgian minister at Berlin:

"All eyes were turned toward Kiel, where the fatal news reached William II. while he was taking part in a yacht race on board his own clipper. He turned pale, and was heard to murmur: 'So my work of the past twenty-five years will have to be started all over again!' Enigmatic words, which may be interpreted in various ways! To the British ambassador, who was also at Kiel, with the British squadron returning from the Baltic, he unburdened himself in more explicit fashion: 'Es ist ein Verbrechen gegen das Deutschtum.' By this he probably meant that Germany, feeling her own interests assailed by the Serajevo crime, would make common cause with Austria to exact a full retribution. With more self-control than usual, however, he abstained from all further public utterances on the subject.'

وو

"It is a crime against Deutschtum." We have already seen that the Emperor was con* "Germany Before the War," p. 276.

vinced that war with France was inevitable, and the statement of Mr. Jordan shows that a large party in Germany desired such a war in the interest of Deutschtum, and regardless of the Balkans. This was the view of the General Staff, and the Kaiser, as we saw, was, on essentials at least, in accord with General von Moltke. Was the time favorable for the "inevitable" stroke?

Russia was in no condition to make war. Austria and Germany were convinced of this. It was the expressed opinion of the Austrian ambassador at Berlin and the German ambassador at Vienna. France was in the hands of unpatriotic radicals, and the Minister of War had confessed that the army was poorly supplied. Reports from London seemed to prove that England would not enter the conflict, and she seemed, furthermore, on the verge of civil war over the Irish question. So favorable a juncture of circumstances could hardly occur again. Either Russia and France would have to stand aside in humiliation while Germany and Austria forced their way to the east through Serbia and realized Middle Europe or, if they

refused to accept such humiliation and offered resistance, the score could now very advantageously be settled and Germany's two European rivals be rendered harmless for the future.

Americans have often insisted on the German inability to understand the psychology of other peoples. Let us not fall into the same error and fail to understand the psychology of the Germans. They are a different people, nationalistic and imperialistic, who believe in the superiority of Deutschtum. Their young men have not been trained to honor and respect a Washington or a Lincoln, who would sacrifice all and even themselves in the interest of truth, of justice, of humanity. Their national heroes, the men they are taught to revere, were men of force, who succeeded through deceit. Bismarck, who boasted of having brought on a successful war through suppression of the truth, is their Lincoln. Frederick the Great wrote from the camp at Mollwitz to his minister, de Podervils: "If there is anything to be gained by it, we will be honest; if deception is necessary, let us be cheats."* Frederick the

* Letter dated May 12, 1741. Cf. also J. B. Scott, "A Survey," pp. xxii et seq.

Great is their Washington. Professor Adolf Lasson, one of their greatest and most honored teachers of international law, tells them: "The state breaking a treaty enters into a state of war; it acts unwisely whenever it challenges a decision through the force of arms, unless it is sure of its superior force. If it has this force, then it may do whatever it pleases; for between states the right of the strong alone prevails. The weaker is, in spite of any and all

treaties, the prey of the stronger, whenever the latter wills to and can prey upon it." Instead, therefore, of being shocked to find that a great state like Germany should deliberately' stoop to violence and fraud, we should rather expect it, and instead of granting ready belief to her excuses we must weigh them with care. In the process of doing so we shall arrive at far different conceptions of the origin of the war than those which prevailed in the early period of our neutrality, and we shall perhaps be forced to agree with Doctor Dernberg (for a time the Kaiser's personal agent in America) and Doctor Delbrück when, in their petition printed in Deutsche Politik for September 28, 1917, they proclaim in sorrow: