On the other hand, the head of a large warehouse told me only a few days later that when travelling in Germany for his firm some fifteen years ago he had a conversation with a German, in the course of which he (the Englishman) said:  “I find your people so obliging and friendly that I think surely whatever little differences there are between us as nations will be dispelled by closer intercourse, and so all danger of war will pass away.”  “No,” replied the German, “you are quite mistaken.  You and I are friendly; but that is only as individuals.  As nations we shall never rest till we have war.  The English nation may well be contented because they have already got all the good things of the Earth—­their trade, their ports, their colonies; but Germany will not allow this to go on for ever.  She will fight for her rightful position in the world; she will challenge England’s mercantile supremacy.  She will have to do so, and she will not fail."[16]

Thus the plot thickened; the entanglement increased.  The Boer War roused ill-feeling between England and Germany.  The German Navy Bill followed in 1900, and the Kaiser announced his intention of creating a sea-power the equal of any in the world.  Britain of course replied with her Navy Bills; and the two countries were committed to a mad race of armaments.  The whole of Europe stood by anxious.  Fear and Greed, the two meanest of human passions, ruled everywhere.  Fear of a militarist Germany began to loom large upon the more pacific States of Europe.  On the other hand, the fatality of Alsace-Lorraine loomed in Germany, full of forebodings of revenge.  France had found a friend in Russia—­a sinister alliance.  Britain, convinced that trouble was at hand, came to an understanding with France in 1904 and with Russia in 1907.  The Triple Entente was born as a set-off against the Triple Alliance.  The Agadir incident in 1911 betrayed the purely commercial nature of the designs of the four Powers concerned—­France, Spain, England, and Germany—­and a war over the corpse of Morocco was only narrowly avoided.  Germany felt quite naturally that she was the victim of a plot, and thenceforth was alternately convulsed by mad Ambition and haunted by a lurking Terror.

And now we come to the last act of the great drama.  So far the relations of Germany with Russia had not been strained.  If there was any fear of Russia, it was quite in the background.  The Junkers—­themselves half Slavs—­had supplied a large number of the Russian officials, men like Plehve and Klingenberg; the Russian bureaucracy was founded on and followed the methods of the German.  The Japanese War called Russia’s attention away to another part of the world, and at the same time exposed her weakness.  But if Germany was not troubled about Russia, a different sentiment was growing up in Russia itself.  The people there were beginning to hate the official German influence and its hard atmosphere of militarism, so foreign to the Russian mind.  They were looking more and more to France.  Bismarck had made a great mistake in the Treaty of Berlin—­mistake which he afterwards fully recognized and regretted.  He had used the treaty to damage and weaken Russia, and had so thrown Russia into the arms of France.