"Numerous manufacturers, merchants, and
financiers in a moderate way of business." The non-German elements of the
Empire. Finally, the Government and the governing classes in the large
southern States. A goodly array of peace forces! According to M. Cambon,
however, all these latter elements "are only a sort of make-weight in
political matters with limited influence on public opinion, or they are
silent social forces, passive and defenceless against the infection of
a wave of warlike feeling." This last sentence is pregnant. It describes
the state of affairs existing, more or less, in all countries; a few
individuals, a few groups or cliques, making for war more or less
deliberately; the mass of the people ignorant and unconcerned, but also
defenceless against suggestion, and ready to respond to the call to war,
with submission or with enthusiasm, as soon as the call is made by their
Government.

On the testimony, then, of these witnesses, all shrewd and competent
observers, it may be permitted to sum up somewhat as follows:--

In the years immediately preceding the war the mass of the people in
Germany, rich and poor, were attached to peace and dreaded war. But there
was there also a powerful minority either desiring war or expecting it,
and, in either case, preparing it by their agitation. And this minority
could appeal to the peculiarly aggressive form of patriotism inculcated by
the public schools and universities. The war party based its appeal for
ever fresh armaments on the hostile preparations of the Powers of the
Entente. Its aggressive ambition masqueraded, perhaps even to itself,
as a patriotism apprehensively concerned with defence. It was supported
by powerful moneyed interests; and the mass of the people, passive,
ill-informed, preoccupied, were defenceless against its agitation. The
German Government found the Pangermans embarrassing or convenient according
as the direction of its policy and the European situation changed from
crisis to crisis. They were thus at one moment negligible, at another
powerful. For long they agitated vainly, and they might long have continued
to do so. But if the moment should come at which the Government should make
the fatal plunge, their efforts would have contributed to the result, their
warnings would seem to have been justified, and they would triumph as
the party of patriots that had foretold in vain the coming crash to an
unbelieving nation.

[Footnote 1: "L'Enigme A