for years (and let England, too, remember this) preaching militarism as a means of securing commercial advantage, and then refuse to be answerable for the results to which such a policy may lead.  The Junker classes of Prussia and their Kaiser might be suffering from a bad attack of swelled head; vanity and arrogance might be filling them with dreams of world-empire; but there would have been no immediate European war had not the vast trade-interests of Germany come into conflict, or seemed to come into conflict, with the trade-interests of the surrounding nations—­had not the financial greed of the nation been stirred, as well as its military vanity.

And talking of general trade and finance, one must not forget to include the enormous powers exercised in the present day by individual corporations and individual financiers who intrude their operations into the sphere of politics.  We saw that in our own Boer War; and behind the scenes in Germany to-day similar influences are at work.  The Deutsche Bank, with immense properties all over the world, and some L85,000,000 sterling in its hands in deposits alone, initiated financially the Baghdad Railway scheme.  Its head, Herr Arthur von Gwinner, the great financier, is a close adviser of the Kaiser.  “The railway is already nearly half built, and it represents a German investment of between L16,000,000 and L18,000,000.  Let this be thought of when people imagine that Germany and Austria went to war with the idea of avenging the murder of an Archduke....  All German trade would suffer if the Baghdad Railway scheme were to fail."[5] Then there is Herr August Thyssen—­“King Thyssen”—­who owns coalmines, rolling mills, harbours, and docks throughout Germany, iron-ore mines in France, warehouses in Russia, and entrepots in nearly every country from Brazil and Argentina to India.[6] He has declared that German interests in Asia Minor must be safeguarded at all costs.  But Russia also has large prospective commercial interests in Asia Minor.  The moral is clear and needs no enforcing.  Such men as these—­and many others, the Rathenaus, Siemens, Krupps, Ballins, and Heinekens—­exercise in Germany an immense political influence, just as do our financial magnates at home.  They represent the peaks and summits of wide-spreading commercial activities whose bases are rooted among the general public.  Yet through it all it must not be forgotten that they represent in each case (as I shall explain more clearly presently) the interests of a class—­the commercial class—­but not of the whole nation.

One must, then, modify the first conclusion, that the blame of the war rests with the military class, by adding a second factor, namely, the rise and influence of the commercial class.  These two classes, acting and reacting on each other, and pushing—­though for different reasons—­in the same direction, are answerable, as far as Germany is concerned, for dragging Europe into this trouble; and they must share the blame.