seems to have been already plainly declared by most of the civilized
nations of the world.

We think that Mr. Beck's opinion that England and France were taken
unawares and were wholly unprepared for war is a little too strongly
expressed. France, certainly, had been making ready for war with
Germany ever since the great conflict of 1870 had resulted in her
loss of Alsace and Lorraine, and had had a fixed and unalterable
determination to get them back when she could, although it is evident
that she did not expect her opportunity to come just when and as it
did. That Great Britain had no present expectation of immediate war
with Germany is clearly obvious. That she had long been apprehending
the danger of it in the indefinite future is very clear, but that Sir
Edward Grey and the Government and the people that he represented did
all that they possibly could to prevent the war seems to be clearly
established.

Mr. Beck's book is so extremely interesting from beginning to end that
it is difficult when once begun to lay it down and break off the
reading, and we shall not be surprised to hear, not only that it has
had an immense sale in England and America, but that its translation
into the languages of the other nations of Europe has been demanded.

JOSEPH H. CHOATE.

NEW YORK, January 10, 1915.

FOREWORD

On the eve of the Great War I sat one evening in the reading room of
the Hotel Erbprinz in classic Weimar. I had spent ten happy days in
Thuringia, and had visited with deep interest a little village near
Erfurt, where one of my forbears was born. I had seen Jena, from whose
historic university this paternal ancestor had gone as a missionary
to North America in the middle of the eighteenth century. This
simple-minded German pietist had cherished the apparent delusion
that even the uncivilized Indians of the American wilderness
might be taught--the Bernhardis and Treitschkes to the contrary
notwithstanding--that to increase the political power of a nation by
the deliberate and highly systematized destruction of its neighbors
was not the truest political ideal, even of an Indian tribe.

This missionary had gone most fittingly to the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania, where its enlightened founder had already given a
demonstration of the truth that a treaty of peace, even though not
formally expressed in a "scrap of paper," might be kept by white men
and so-called savages with scrupulous fidelity