I have always felt the deepest aversion for William II.  So few as ten years ago he was still treated with the greatest sympathy both in Europe and America.  Even democracies regarded with ill-dissimulated admiration the work of the Kaiser, who brought everywhere his voice, his enthusiasm, his activity, to the service of Germany.  As a matter of fact, his speeches were poor in phraseology, a mere conglomerate of violence, prejudice and ignorance.  As no one believed in the possibility of a war, no one troubled about it.  But after the War nothing has been more harmful to Germany than the memory of those ugly speeches, unrelieved by any noble idea, and full of a clumsy vulgarity draped in a would-be solemn and majestic garb.  Some of his threatening utterances, such as the address to the troops sailing for China in order to quell the Boxer rebellion, the constant association in all his speeches of the great idea of God, with the ravings of a megalomaniac, the frenzied oratory in which he indulged at the beginning of the War, have harmed Germany more than anything else.  It is possible to lose nobly; but to have lost a great war after having won so many battles would not have harmed the German people if it had not been represented abroad by the presumptuous vulgarity of the Kaiser and of all the members of his entourage, who were more or less guilty of the same attitude.

Before the War Germany had everywhere attained first place in all forms of activity, excepting, perhaps, in certain spiritual and artistic manifestations.  She admired herself too much and too openly, but succeeded in affirming her magnificent expansion in a greatness and prosperity without rival.

By common accord Germany held first place.  Probably this consciousness of power, together with the somewhat brutal forms of the struggle for industrial supremacy, as in the case of the iron industry, threw a mysterious and threatening shadow over the granitic edifice of the Empire.

When I was Minister of Commerce in 1913 I received a deputation of German business men who wished to confer with me on the Italian customs regime.  They spoke openly of the necessity of possessing themselves of the iron mines of French Lorraine; they looked upon war as an industrial fact.  Germany had enough coal but not enough iron, and the Press of the iron industry trumpeted forth loud notes of war.  After the conclusion of peace, when France, through a series of wholly unexpected events, saw Germany prostrate at her feet and without an army, the same phenomenon took place.  The iron industry tends to affirm itself in France; she has the iron and now she wants coal.  Should she succeed in getting it, German production would be doomed.  To deprive Germany of Upper Silesia would mean killing production after having disorganized it at the very roots of its development.

Seven years ago, or thereabouts, Germany was flourishing in an unprecedented manner and presented the most favourable conditions for developing.  Her powerful demographic structure was almost unique.  Placed in the centre of Europe after having withstood the push of so many peoples, she had attained an unrivalled economic position.