kers and other jingoes neither wavered nor hesitated. They
saw in their grasp the opportunity for which they had been plotting
these many years and they were not minded to let it escape them. They
considered the moment peculiarly propitious because of the internal
preoccupations of England and France.

And they succeeded in sweeping the German Government off its feet as
well as the sober and sensible thinking majority of the German people.
They succeeded in rushing your Government and people into the belief
that the Russian mobilization signified a menace dangerous to
Germany's very existence, and that every day of delay in meeting that
danger might mean disastrous consequences.

This was not the first time that an attempt had been made by that
party to bring the Kaiser and his people suddenly face to face with a
situation which they meant should spell war--a war which they felt
certain would end in a quick and decisive German victory. Of at least
one flagrant example of such manoeuvring I have personal knowledge.

That the jingo party, against what I believe to have been the
tendencies of the Kaiser's and the Chancellor's policies, thus
succeeded at last in their fateful and atrocious design--although the
manifest interests and, doubtless, the inclination of the masses of
your people were for the maintenance of peace--is explainable only by
the Germans' amazing lack of understanding for the deeper qualities,
sentiments, ideals, modes of thought and characteristics of other
nations as distinguished from their outward peculiarities, methods and
habits.

This lack of understanding, doubly amazing in a people so intelligent
and instructed and so successful in its commercial dealings with the
rest of the world, is strikingly exemplified in your complete
misjudgment as to the cohesive power of the British Empire and as to
the loyalty of its component parts and subject races; by your gross
underestimate of France _and by your general miscalculation as to how
the peoples challenged by you would react to the supreme test of war_.

That Austria and Russia, through their mobilizations and other
measures originating from a mixture of bluff and fear, managed to get
each other into an utterly unreasoning state of nerves, is entirely
comprehensible. They did not trust each other, and above all, they did
not trust themselves, their own strength and preparedness.

But Germany, in the knowledge of her powerful moral and military