like to say good-bye to it. I prefer the principle of a League of
Nations, if that be practicable, or, at the very least, of an Entente
comprising all the Powers. But if neither of these alternatives be
possible there remains, for the people who desire to be secure, only the
method of the balance of power. Now Germany drove us to this by her
indisposition to change her traditional policy and to be content to
rely on the settlement of specific differences for the good feeling that
always tends to result. She had, it is true, the misfortune for so
strong a nation to have been born a hundred years too late. She had got
less in Africa than she might have had. We were ready to help her to a
place in the sun there and elsewhere in the world, and to give up
something for this end, if only we could secure peace and contentment on
her part. But she would not have it so, and she chose to follow the
principle of relying on the "Mailed Fist." Of this policy, when pursued
recklessly, Bismarck well understood the danger. "Prestige politics," as
he called them, he hated. In February, 1888, he laid down in a
well-known speech what he held to be the true principle. "Every Great
Power which seeks to exert pressure on the politics of other countries,
and to direct affairs outside the sphere of interest which God has
assigned to it, carries on politics of power, and not of interest; it
works for prestige." But that principle was not consistently followed by
William the Second. Into the detailed story of his departure from it I
have not space to enter. But those who wish to follow this will do well
to read the narrative contained in an admirable and open-minded book by
Mr. Harbutt Dawson, "The German Empire from 1867 to 1914," in the
second volume of which the story is told in detail.

Instead of trying to alter the traditional attitude of Germany to her
neighbors, Herr von Bethmann Hollweg let it continue. That he did not
want it to continue I am pretty sure. At page 130 of his book he appeals