Germany, at last one and united and secure on land, looked across the
seas and seeing England with sources of wealth insuring a luxury and
power which Germany could not hope to rival by the slower processes of
exploiting her own peasants and workingmen, especially with these
workers half in revolt, immediately built her navy and entered into a
desperate competition for possession of colonies of darker peoples. To
South America, to China, to Africa, to Asia Minor, she turned like a
hound quivering on the leash, impatient, suspicious, irritable, with
blood-shot eyes and dripping fangs, ready for the awful word. England
and France crouched watchfully over their bones, growling and wary, but
gnawing industriously, while the blood of the dark world whetted their
greedy appetites. In the background, shut out from the highway to the
seven seas, sat Russia and Austria, snarling and snapping at each other
and at the last Mediterranean gate to the El Dorado, where the Sick Man
enjoyed bad health, and where millions of serfs in the Balkans, Russia,
and Asia offered a feast to greed well-nigh as great as Africa.

The fateful day came. It had to come. The cause of war is preparation
for war; and of all that Europe has done in a century there is nothing
that has equaled in energy, thought, and time her preparation for
wholesale murder. The only adequate cause of this preparation was
conquest and conquest, not in Europe, but primarily among the darker
peoples of Asia and Africa; conquest, not for assimilation and uplift,
but for commerce and degradation. For this, and this mainly, did Europe
gird herself at frightful cost for war.

The red day dawned when the tinder was lighted in the Balkans and
Austro-Hungary seized a bit which brought her a step nearer to the
world's highway; she seized one bit and poised herself for another. Then