war by making it terrible to the enemy--by the General Staff of Germany,
a body before whose injunctions even the Emperor, so far as my
observation goes, always has bowed.

But I must now return to my formal visit to Berlin in the autumn of
1906. I was, as I have already said, everywhere cordially welcomed, and
at the end the heads of the German Army entertained me at a dinner in
the War Office, at which the War Minister presided, and there was
present, among others, the Chief of the German General Staff. They were
all friendly. I do not think that my impression was wrong that even the
responsible heads of the Army were then looking almost entirely to
"peaceful penetration," with only moral assistance from the prestige
attaching to the possession of great armed forces in reserve. Our
business in the United Kingdom was therefore to see that we were
prepared for perils that might unexpectedly arise out of this policy,
and not less, by developing our educational and industrial organization,
to make ourselves fit to meet the greater likelihood of a coming keen
competition in the peaceful arts.

One thing that seemed to me essential for the preservation of good
relations was that cordial and frequent intercourse between the people
of the two countries should be encouraged and developed. I set myself in
my speeches to avoid all expressions which might be construed as
suggesting a critical attitude on our part, or a failure to recognize
the existence of peaceful ideas among what was then, as I still think, a
large majority of the people of Germany. The attitude of some newspapers
in England, and still more that of the chauvinist minority in Germany
itself, did not render this quite an easy task. But there were good
people in these days in Germany as well as in England, and the United
States might be counted on as likely to co-operate in discouraging