he
direction of affairs in Germany was admirably organized for some
purposes and very badly for others. Her autocratic system lent itself to
efficiency in the preparation of armaments. But it was not really a
system under which her Emperor was left free to guide policy. There is
no greater mistake made than that under which it is popularly supposed
that the Emperor was absolute master. The development in recent years of
the influence of the General and Admiral Staffs, which was a necessity
from the point of view of modern organization for war but required
keeping in careful check from other points of view, had produced forces
which the Emperor was powerless to hold in. Even in Bismarck's time
readers of his "Reflections and Recollections" will remember how he felt
the embarrassment of his foreign policy caused by the growing and
deflecting influences of Moltke, and even of his friend Roon. And there
was no Bismarck to hold the Staffs in check for reasons of expediency in
the years before 1914. The military mind when it is highly developed is
dangerous. It sees only its own bit, but this it sees with great
clearness, and in consequence becomes very powerful. There is only one
way of holding it to its legitimate function, and that is by the
supremacy of public opinion in a Parliament as its final exponent.
Parliaments may be clumsy and at times ignorant. But they do express, it
may be vaguely, but yet sufficiently, the sense of the people at large.
Now, notwithstanding all that had been done to educate them up to it, I
do not think that the people at large in Germany had ever endorsed the
implications of the policy of German militarism. The Social Democrats
certainly had not. They ought, I think, to be judged even now by what
they said before the war, and not by what some, tho not all of them,
said when it was pressed on them in 1914 that Germany had to fight for
her life. Had she possessed a true Parliamentary system for a generation
before the war there would probably have been no war. What has happened
to her is a vindication of Democracy as the best political system
despite certain drawbacks which attach to it.

The great defect of the German Imperial system was that, unless the
Emperor was strong enough to impose his will on his advisers, he was
largely at their mercy. Had they been chosen by the people, the people
and not the Emperor would have borne the responsibility, if the views of
these advisers diverged from t