September 20, 1917 
LATVD & WATER 
results of a false Policy should not have been perceived by the 
men of the time. Every schoolmaster has had to answer 
over and over again the question " Why did the Western 
Alliance not fight until it had destroyed the enemy ? " It 
seems to us clear that victory was a necessity to their very 
life, that in a struggle of this sort only definite victory in the 
field could ensure peace and even survival, that we are be- 
wildered by its absence. Those who have gone a little further 
into the matter are almost equally puzzled by the fact that 
the inconclusive peace which was the root of all that followed 
was parleved for just at the moment when victory was at 
last within the grasp of the Allies. But the fact is, I 
repeat, that here, as in every other parallel, though minor, 
historical discussion we forget the mental attitude of con- 
temporaries. 
Three normal years are not the measure of time by which 
to judge the mental revolutions which took place in those 
three years of furnace, and the future, even the immediately 
future consequences of their action, which are to us so plainly 
inevitable, were as wholly hidden from them as is our future 
from us. 
But let me begin at the beginning. 
With the outbreak of the great war the position is per- 
fectly simple. You have among the various European 
States one, Prussia, which is not heard of in the long history 
of Europe till quite the close of that history. When we first 
hear of it it seems to us to play at first a somewhat insigni- 
ficant part, and only quite towards the end a curious and 
inexplicably enlarged one. 
During all the majestic process of European development 
with which we are so familiar, the name of Prussia is unknown. 
The rise of the great European States upon the gradual dis- 
solution of the Roman Empire, their connection in common 
morals and religion, their marvellous achievements in the 
arts, the splendid blossoming of the vernacular languages 
and their magnificent literature— with all this Prussia had 
nothing to do, for Prussia did not exist. 
A Poisonous Irritant 
We do not hear the name (in what remains to us) until the 
eighteenth century, and even then it is no niore than a sort of 
small poisonous irritant in the body of Europe. It produces 
no literature, no art, no science. We are familiar with the 
praises bestowed upon it here and there as a military organi- 
sation, but even that is broken in what may be called the 
Augustan age of Europe, when the triumph of the French 
Revolution seemed to have achieved a permanent, settled, 
and superior form of civilisation to all the European peoples. 
Then, suddenly, in the lifetime of a man, we find that 
organisation suddenly rising to predominance. It becomes 
the master of the German tribes, inspires them in what is to 
us an inexplicable belief in some fancied superiority of their 
own. We have extravagant allusions to German music and 
to German philosophy— German everything — which are to 
us to-day unintelligible. We have the much more solid facts 
of the three nineteenth century wars, which end by the estab- 
lishment of that ephemeral and unreal thing called for a 
generation " the German Empire," and meaning, of course, 
the Prussian establishment of the norther* Germans. 
We see this novel and artificial thing rapidly drawing 
into its orbit the whole of Central Europe, and then quite 
suddenly and unexpectedly, like a whirlwind, it looses the 
great war. 
The men of the time— I mean the men of the moment in 
which the great war broke out— were perfectly clear upon 
either side of its nature and of its objects. Of that there can 
be no possible doubt. There is no phenomenon in history so 
clear cut or so simple. 
This novel and, as it was to prove, ephemeral power, which 
is no more than Prussia writ large, proposes to impose itself 
by conquest as the chief of all Europe. 
We may ridicule, as all our historians do ridicule, such a 
pretension. It seems monstrous in its proportion between 
means and end. It was monstrous. It was based upon a 
foolish and even vulgar illusion. But of the strength of that 
illusion there is no doubt at all. 
Not only the leaders of this new German Empire, with its 
Allies, but the whole mass of its people-— all tfhose who wrote 
for it, all those who boasted of it, all those who framed its 
policy— maintained without qualification at once the possi- 
bility and the necessity of a war with conqrKst. The only 
question apparently debated was the moment: best fitted for 
the inception of such a war. The curious 1 lave unearthed 
here and there a protest or a misgiving amor ig some of those 
who were subject to the directing force of the new power. 
But those protests or those misgivings, so far as contem- 
poraries were concerned, were quite insignificant. They 
passed unnoticed in the mass of affirmation: which was the 
note of the whole time. We sliall not understand that time 
at all, nor be just, as we must be just, even to those who pro- 
voked so decisive a calamity unless we appreciate their point 
of view and note that it was universal among them. What 
is clearly in the general light of history, a vulgar and un- 
instructed pride, was, in the eyes of those who suffered from 
that folly, a simple truth. 
They thought that the new State, being far more than the 
mere equal of its neighbours, was unduly circumscribed, that 
its strength merited and could obtain far more than the 
general arrangement of Europe had granted it. They were 
completely confident of success in any enterprise against no 
matter what combination the older States might erect for 
their own defence, and, when the war was launched by the 
Prussian Government, it was launched without any shadow 
of doubt in the minds of the aggressors that their aggression 
would be justified by success. 
Steps Toward War 
Here the modern student will question our conclusions. 
He will say that it was not possible for any people living 
within the community of so active and independent a con- 
geries of States to misunderstand the position so completely. 
The simple fact is that they did so misunderstand it. In 
the same way one might have insisted that the Papacy of the 
sixteenth century could not conceivably have misunderstood 
the situation of Europe when the Reformation broke out. 
It is a matter of plain historical fact that the Papacy, with all 
its opportunities for information, did so misunderstand it. 
If proof were wanted it would be amply afforded by one 
detail of general policy undertaken by the new power. I 
mean their building of a great fleet to challenge the naval 
superiority of Great Britain. That act which— «ven if we 
knew of no other — would determine for us the monstrous 
miscalculation under which they suffered, is conclusive. 
But apart from that you have a most illuminating series of 
incidents the few years before the war. The Prussian Govern- 
ment had upon four separate occasions challenged the power 
of defence of those whom it threatened, and upon eacii occasion 
those whom it threatened had given way. 
Such yielding was unwise, but it had taken place ; and we 
shall quite misunderstand history if we do' not appreciate 
what the effect of these surrenders was upon the Prussian and 
consequently upon the German mind. \\'e represent them to- 
day in history as some motion before the storm : mere indica- 
tions of what was to come. But they were more than this to 
contemporaries. We see them crowded into a few brief years 
which are, for us, the preparation only of the great calamity. 
They read each of them in turn as a successful effort to ward 
oft' that calamity by compromise. 
The English and the French had permitted Prussia and 
her Allies to challenge the Russian Empire in the Balkans by 
the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The French 
had allowed a direct interference with their domestic affairs, 
and twice on a threat of war from the Germans had given 
way. First in 1894, when the elaborate system of espionage 
established by the German Embassy in Paris was exposed, 
and afterwards when M. Delcasse, seven years afterwards, 
resigned at the dictation of this Foreign Power. 
Great Britain, it may be said, had not gone so far in com- 
promise, nor^ yielded so conspicuously to the increasing in- 
solence of tljle new claims. It is true that Great Britain had 
not suffered any humiliation so direct as had been suffered by 
the Governments of the Russian Empire and of the French 
Republic, but Great Britain herself had attempted more than 
once to parry tlie threat of force by accommodation. Missions 
had been sent to propose some proportion between the two 
fleets and those missions had been undertaken on the initiative 
not of the threatening power, but of the power threatened. 
Up to the last moment those who had the most experience of 
British policy and who were in the best traditions of the past 
still hesitated to admit the issue. Even after the ultimatum 
was issued to France, it was hoped that war might be avoided, 
and almost the last acts of British statesmen before war 
actually broke out, were acts temporising with the force that 
was upon them. 
In the summer of 1914 itself, we have upon tho one side 
of the great quarrel a perfectly clear situation. The subjects 
and the Allies of Prussia were determined upon war. They 
determined upon a war which they were certain would be 
victorious and brief. They were determined upon a: war for 
which they could choose their own moment and for which 
they had chosen their own moment. They made in- the eye 
of all Europe a great levy upon the national wealth of tide 
German Empire long before the first blow was struck, and they 
openly called that levy a preparation for war. They abnor- 
mally increased their already gigantic military forcf».>, and 
their press, the speeches of their public men, a] I the 
