population. The
modest, simple-living, middle-class households of fifty years ago have
largely disappeared, and in their place have sprung up, at any rate in
the larger towns, the very same commercial and parasitical classes, with
their Philistine luxury and fatuous ideals, which have been so
depressing and distressing a feature of _our_ social life during the
same period. Naturally, the desire of these classes has been for the
glorification of Germany, the establishment of an absolutely world-wide
commercial supremacy, and the ousting of England from her markets.

"Germany," said Peter Kropotkin[4] a year or two ago, "on entering a
striking period of juvenile activity, quickly succeeded in doubling and
trebling her industrial productivity, and soon increasing it tenfold;
and now the German middle classes covet new sources of enrichment in
the plains of Poland, in the prairies of Hungary, on the plateaux of
Africa, and especially around the railway line to Baghdad--in the rich
valleys of Asia Minor, which can provide German capitalists with a
labouring population ready to be exploited under one of the most
beautiful skies in the world. It may be so with Egypt some day.
Therefore it is ports for exports, and especially military ports, in the
Adriatic, the Persian Gulf, on the African coast in Beira, and also in
the Pacific, that these schemers of German colonial trade wish to
conquer. Their faithful servant, the German Empire, with its armies and
ironclads, is at their service for this purpose."

It is this class, then, which by backing both financially and morally
the military class has been chiefly responsible for bringing about the
war. Not that I mean, in saying so, that the commercial folk of Germany
have directly instigated its outbreak at the present moment and in the
present circumstances--for many, or most of them, must have seen how
dangerous it was likely to prove to their trade. But in respect of the
general policy which they have so long pursued they are responsible. One
cannot go on for years (and let England, too, remember this) preaching
militarism as a means of securing commercial advantage, and then refuse
to be answerable for the results to which such a policy may lead. The
Junker classes of Prussia and their Kaiser might be suffering from a bad
attack of swelled head; vanity and arrogance might be filling them with
dreams of world-empire; but there would have been no immediate European
war had not th