It is obvious, I think, that a military aristocracy alone, or even with the combined support of empire-building philosophers and a jack-boot Kaiser, could not have hurried the solid German nation into so strange a situation.  In old days, and under an avowedly feudal order of society, such a thing might well have happened.  But to-day the source and seat of power has passed from crowned heads and barons into another social stratum.  It is the financial and commercial classes in the modern States who have the sway; and unless these classes desire it the military cliques may plot for war in vain.  Since 1870, and the unification of Germany, the growth of her manufactures and her trade has been enormous; her commercial prosperity has gone up by leaps and bounds; and this extension of trade, especially of international trade, has led—­as it had already so conspicuously done in England—­to the development of corresponding ideals and habits of life among the population.  The modest, simple-living, middle-class households of fifty years ago have largely disappeared, and in their place have sprung up, at any rate in the larger towns, the very same commercial and parasitical classes, with their Philistine luxury and fatuous ideals, which have been so depressing and distressing a feature of our social life during the same period.  Naturally, the desire of these classes has been for the glorification of Germany, the establishment of an absolutely world-wide commercial supremacy, and the ousting of England from her markets.

“Germany,” said Peter Kropotkin[4] a year or two ago, “on entering a striking period of juvenile activity, quickly succeeded in doubling and trebling her industrial productivity, and soon increasing it tenfold; and now the German middle classes covet new sources of enrichment in the plains of Poland, in the prairies of Hungary, on the plateaux of Africa, and especially around the railway line to Baghdad—­in the rich valleys of Asia Minor, which can provide German capitalists with a labouring population ready to be exploited under one of the most beautiful skies in the world.  It may be so with Egypt some day.  Therefore it is ports for exports, and especially military ports, in the Adriatic, the Persian Gulf, on the African coast in Beira, and also in the Pacific, that these schemers of German colonial trade wish to conquer.  Their faithful servant, the German Empire, with its armies and ironclads, is at their service for this purpose.”

It is this class, then, which by backing both financially and morally the military class has been chiefly responsible for bringing about the war.  Not that I mean, in saying so, that the commercial folk of Germany have directly instigated its outbreak at the present moment and in the present circumstances—­for many, or most of them, must have seen how dangerous it was likely to prove to their trade.  But in respect of the general policy which they have so long pursued they are responsible.  One cannot go on