nt attention must be called to the fundamental
difficulty with which all negotiations at that time, and subsequently,
were confronted, and necessarily confronted. In Germany it was seen
very clearly from the start that the probability of a combined
French-Russian attack, for which influential political groups in St.
Petersburg, as well as in Paris, were working, was very slight, so
long as England's entrance into this anti-German combination could be
left out of consideration. What we hoped to insure, therefore, was
England's neutrality in the event of war, inasmuch as a German-English
alliance, which might have definitely insured world peace, could not
be effected. In order to win England over to the idea of neutrality,
the Imperial Chancellor declared his willingness to decrease the rate
at which our war vessels were being constructed. Both nations,
moreover, were to give assurances that neither intended to attack the
other, nor actually would make an attack. A second clause in the
German proposal formulated the neutrality obligation. These
negotiations continued until the Autumn of the year 1909, and were
accompanied by the threatening chorus of the English anti-German
press: "German dreadnoughts must not be built." [Black and White--"The
Writing on the Wall."] The positive refusal on the part of Germany to
abandon the naval program adopted by the Reichstag, and the fixed idea
designedly fostered by the British Government that we were cherishing
the intention of attacking France, gave England a pretext for
rejecting the German efforts to effect an understanding between the
two countries. But it is impossible to believe in the honesty of these
arguments, which were recently defended, in dialectic perversion of
the truth, by Sir Edward Cook in an article entitled "How Britain
Strove for Peace." England's aggressive tendency is clearly shown by
its above-mentioned agreements with France and Russia, which are today
publici juris. Regarding that point there was no self-deception in
those English circles which did not belong to the conspiracy; Edward
Dicey, one of the most eminent of English publicists, expressed it in
point-blank form in February, 1910, when he wrote in The Empire
Review: "If England and Germany are friends, the peace of Europe is
assured; but if the two nations fall apart, it will be a very
unfortunate day for humanity." At that time, when Delcasse tendencies
were again asserting themselves in France and