ny, his desire was that
the nation, whose development beyond all expectation was filling
him with conscious pride, should be spurred on to a fresh
heightening of its energies. He sought to give it a continuous
impulse with the energy of his enthusiastic nature. He wished his
people to be strong and powerful in capacity to arm for their
defense, but the German mission, which was for him a consuming
faith, was yet to be a mission of work and of peace. That this
work and this peace should not be destroyed by the dangers that
surrounded us, was his increasing anxiety. Again and again has the
Kaiser told me that his journey to Tangier in 1904, as to which he
was quite unaware that it would lead to dangerous complications,
was undertaken much against his own will, and only under pressure
from his political advisers. Moreover, his personal influence was
strongly exerted for a settlement of the Morocco crisis of 1905.
And the same sense of the need of peace gave rise to his attitude
during the Boer War and also during the Russo-Japanese War. To a
ruler who really wanted war, opportunities for military
intervention in the affairs of the world were truly not lacking.

"Critics in Germany had in that period frequently pressed the
point that a too frequent insistence in public on our readiness
for peace was less likely to further it than, on the contrary, to
strengthen the Entente in its policy of altering the _status quo_.
In a period of Imperialism in which the talk about material power
was loud, and in which the preservation of the peace of the world
was considered only accidentally, like the ten years before the
war, considerations such as these are undoubtedly full of
significance, and perhaps the same sort of thing explains a good
deal of strong language on the part of the Kaiser about Germany's
capacity in case of war. It is certain that such utterances did
not lessen the feeling of nervousness that filled the
international atmosphere. But the true ground of such nervousness
was the policy of the balance of power, which had split Europe
into two armed camps full of distrust of each other. The
Ambassadors of the Great Powers knew the Kaiser intimately enough
to realize what his intentions, in spite of everything, were, and
it required an untruthfulness only explicable by the psychological
effect of war to permit the suggestion of a hateful and distorte