read
roots to the very foundation of human society. The fear of statesmen,
upon which all international relations were based, was in the hearts
of peoples. France was afraid of Germany and screwed up her military
service, her war preparations, to the limit of national endurance, the
majority of the people of France accepting the burden as inevitable
and right. Because of her fear of Germany France made her alliance with
Russian Czardom, her entente cordiale with Imperial England, and the
French people poured their money into Russian loans as a life insurance
against the German menace. French statesmen knew that their diplomacy
was supported by the majority of the people by their ignorance as well
as by their knowledge.

So it was in Germany. The spell-words of the German war lords expressed
the popular sentiment of the German people, which was largely influenced
by the fear of Russia in alliance with France, by fear and envy of the
British Empire and England's sea-power, and by the faith that Germany
must break through that hostile combination at all costs in order to
fulfil the high destiny which was marked out for her, as she thought,
by the genius and industry of her people. The greed of the "bloated
aristocrats" was only on a bigger scale than the greed of the small
shopkeepers. The desire to capture new markets belonged not only to
statesmen, but to commercial travelers. The German peasant believed as
much in the might of the German armies as Hindenburg and Ludendorff.
The brutality of German generals was not worse than that of the
Unteroffizier or the foreman of works.

In England there was no traditional hatred of Germany, but for some
years distrust and suspicions, which had been vented in the newspapers,
with taunts and challenges, stinging the pride of Germans and playing
into the hands of the Junker caste.

Our war psychology was different from that of our allies because of our
island position and our faith in seapower which had made us immune from
the fear of invasion. It took some time to awaken the people to a sense
of real peril and of personal menace to their hearths and homes. To the
very end masses of English folk believed that we were fighting for the
rescue of other peoples--Belgian, French, Serbian, Rumanian--and not for
the continuance of our imperial power.

The official propaganda, the words and actions of British statesmen,
did actually express the conscious and subconscious psychology of th