um of power, found on its path William II with his
mediocre collaborators, it ruined, by war, a colossal work, not only
to the great detriment of the country, but also to that of the victors
themselves, of whom it cannot be said with any amount of certainty,
so far as those of the Continent are concerned, whether they are the
winners or the losers, so great is the ruin threatening them, and so
vast the material and moral losses sustained.

I have always felt the deepest aversion for William II. So few as ten
years ago he was still treated with the greatest sympathy both in
Europe and America. Even democracies regarded with ill-dissimulated
admiration the work of the Kaiser, who brought everywhere his voice,
his enthusiasm, his activity, to the service of Germany. As a matter
of fact, his speeches were poor in phraseology, a mere conglomerate
of violence, prejudice and ignorance. As no one believed in the
possibility of a war, no one troubled about it. But after the War
nothing has been more harmful to Germany than the memory of those ugly
speeches, unrelieved by any noble idea, and full of a clumsy vulgarity
draped in a would-be solemn and majestic garb. Some of his threatening
utterances, such as the address to the troops sailing for China in
order to quell the Boxer rebellion, the constant association in
all his speeches of the great idea of God, with the ravings of a
megalomaniac, the frenzied oratory in which he indulged at the
beginning of the War, have harmed Germany more than anything else. It
is possible to lose nobly; but to have lost a great war after having
won so many battles would not have harmed the German people if it
had not been represented abroad by the presumptuous vulgarity of the
Kaiser and of all the members of his entourage, who were more or less
guilty of the same attitude.

Before the War Germany had everywhere attained first place in all
forms of activity, excepting, perhaps, in certain spiritual and
artistic manifestations. She admired herself too much and too openly,
but succeeded in affirming her magnificent expansion in a greatness
and prosperity without rival.

By common accord Germany held first place. Probably this consciousness
of power, together with the somewhat brutal forms of the struggle for
industrial supremacy, as in the case of the iron industry, threw a
mysterious and threatening shadow over the granitic edifice of the
Empire.

When I was Minister of Commerce in 1913 I rec