The processes were pressed with that strange blend of industry, stupidity, mendacity and cunning which characterize the Prussian and all his acts.  Under our noses a German solidarity was attempted here, and in part achieved.  Organizations having Prussian ends in view were numerous, large, popular and unsuspected.  Threading them through and through was a spy system unbelievably thorough and amazingly adroit.  Potsdam had us marked as a nation of easy going money getters, to be bled white, crammed with her muddy kultur and taught the goose-step, at her imperial leisure, after France and England had fallen to her guns.

But her blend of qualities, no matter how strong in itself, was nullified by just one lack:  the total inability of the Prussian mind to understand the mind of the world exterior to Germany.  In the day of test it failed.

Because of that inability, and knowing full well how readily the German mind could be terrorized, the outbreak of war in Europe brought an outbreak of blind German violence in the United States.  We were to be impressed by the German power to strike.  Our soil was chosen as a garden of domestic sedition, and of foreign conspiracy against powers with which we were at peace.  To keep us busy with troubles of our own, German propaganda and German money in Mexico raised on our southern border a threatening spectre of war.  We were to have been rushed into conflict with Mexico and kept employed there while being terrorized by wholesale arson and sabotage at home, so that by no chance could any friendly European power look to us for help.  The scheme came near to succeeding, for our people were aroused by Mexican aggression, and the flaunting insults of Mexican authority, prompted by German agents.  The policy of our Government saved us from falling into a trap that might have held us fast while Germany overran the whole of Europe and made ready to come a-plundering here at her own time and convenience.

If the truth had been known by the people then as clearly as it was known at Washington, nothing could have held us back:  We would not have bothered with Mexico at all.  We would have joined the free nations of Europe, and nobody may guess what would have happened.  Certainly we could not have assembled the men and the resources we actually and swiftly did assemble later, when the real hour sounded.  We would have cut a sorry figure and gone into the mess confusedly.  Washington knew.  The President knew so well that through 1915 and 1916 he and others in high places never ceased crying a warning to “prepare.”  The President himself toured the country and told the people everywhere that with a world on fire we could not hope to escape unsinged.

He said openly as much as he dared.  Under the surface the Government did much more.  The rapid movement of events once we were declared a combatant would have been impossible otherwise.  That rapidity of effective action surprised the world only because it had all been planned before a word was said.