ternational
politics. In keeping with these teachings and practices were the theft
of foreign passports by the German Government which handed them over
to spies, as in the case of Lody, who was executed in London in the
early part of the war. Thus the binding force of moral and of human
law is dissolved whenever it clashes with German national, military,
or commercial interests. This dogma lies at the roots of Kultur.

By the time war was declared, Germany had stretched forth her
tentacles into various lands and was draining the life-juices of many
peoples. Her footing in Italy, Russia, Belgium and France was firm.
Observant students of international politics fancied they could
determine the approximate date when, if the then rate of progress were
maintained, Germany's overlordship over Europe would be definitely
established and all armed conflicts on the Continent become
thenceforth meaningless. They were all the more puzzled at what they
set down as the egregious folly of jeopardizing the precious fruits of
forty years' well-sustained labours by precipitating a tremendous
conflict of doubtful issue. But besides the sudden temptation to
utilize a conjuncture of exceptionally favourable promise, the leaders
of the Teutonic nations felt moved to appeal to arms by certain slow,
but steady, currents which threatened to change the situation to
Germany's detriment in the space of another few years.

With the remoter causes of the Kaiser's fatal resolve, we are not now
concerned. It may suffice to know that they were numerous and that the
trend of their operation had been for a few months unmistakable. Time,
which was working wonders for the Teuton in one direction, was raising
up redoubtable enemies against him in another. For one thing Russia
was becoming transfigured. The dry bones of the nation which the
Germans often declared was good only as ethnic manure had had life and
a soul breathed into them by the great agrarian reform of which the
credit belongs to Witte and Stolypin. The latter statesman in a series
of conversations had in 1906 opened his mind to me on the subject, and
frankly avowed that the Government, having gone astray in its estimate
of the Russian peasants who turned out to be revolutionary and
anarchistic, was resolved to render them conservative by giving them
land and an interest in the maintenance of law and order. That, he
informed me, was the aim and origin of the agrarian law, and I
expounded the