plot to entrap and encircle her, and that with this in view Russia
mobilized on a great scale for war. It is difficult for us to understand
how real the Slav peril appeared to Germany and to Austria, and there is
little doubt that to the latter Serbia was an unquiet neighbor. But
these considerations must be taken in their context--a context of which
the German public ought to have made itself fully aware. The leaders of
its opinion were bent on domination to the Near East. No wonder that the
Slavs in the Balkan Peninsula became progressively alarmed, and looked
to Russia more and more for protection. For it had become plain that
moral considerations would not be allowed by the authorities at Berlin
to weigh in the balance against material advantages to be gained by
power of domination.

If there is room for reproach to us Anglo-Saxons, it is reproach of a
very different kind. Germany was quite intelligent enough to listen to
reason, and, besides, she had the prospect of becoming the dominating
industrial and commercial power in the world by dint merely of peaceful
penetration. It is possible that, if her relations with her Western
neighbors, including Great Britain, had been more intimate than they
actually were, she might have been saved from a great blunder, and might
have come to understand that the English-speaking races were not really
so inferior to herself as she took them to be. Her _hubris_ was in part,
at all events, the result of ignorance. Speaking for my own countrymen,
I think that neither did we know enough about the Germans nor did the
Germans know enough about us. They were ignorant of the innate capacity
for fighting, in industrial and military conflicts alike, which our
history shows we have always hitherto brought to light in great
emergencies. And they little realized how tremendously moral issues
could stir and unite democracies. We, on the other hand, knew little of
their tradition, their literature, or their philosophy. Our statesmen