mistress. Never has the
doctrine of power been proclaimed with more unflinching directness as
the sole and sufficient motive for state action. There was practically
no pretence that Germany desired to improve the condition of the lands
she wished to possess, or that they were misgoverned, or that the
existing German territories were threatened: what pretence there was,
was invented after war began. The sole and sufficient reason put
forward by the advocates of the policy which Germany was pursuing was
that she wanted more power and larger dominions; and what she wanted
she proposed to take.

On the surface it seemed mere madness for the least and latest of the
great empires to challenge all the rest, just as it had once seemed
madness for Frederick the Great, with his little state, to stand up
against all but one of the great European powers. But Germany had
calculated her chances, and knew that there were many things in her
favour. She knew that in the last resort the strength of the
world-states rested upon their European foundations, and here the
inequality was much less. In a European struggle she could draw great
advantage from her central geographical position, which she had
improved to the highest extent by the construction of a great system of
strategic railways. She could trust to her superbly organised military
system, more perfect than that of any other state, just because no
other state has ever regarded war as the final aim and the highest form
of state action. She commanded unequalled resources in all the
mechanical apparatus of war; she had spared no pains to build up her
armament works, which had, indeed, supplied a great part of the world;
she had developed all the scientific industries in such a way that
their factories could be rapidly and easily turned to war purposes; and
having given all her thoughts to the coming struggle as no other nation
had done, she knew, better than any other, how largely it would turn
upon these things. She counted securely upon winning an immense
advantage from the fact that she would herself fix the date of war, and
enter upon it with a sudden spring, fully prepared, against rivals who,
clinging to the hope of peace, would be unready for the onset. She
hoped to sow jealousies among her rivals; she trusted to catch them at
a time when they were engrossed in their domestic concerns, and in this
respect fate seemed to play into her hands, since at the moment which
she had p