In Germany, as elsewhere, both in home and foreign affairs, there was an intense and unceasing conflict of competing forces and ideas.  In Germany, as elsewhere, policy must have adapted itself to circumstances, different personalities must have given it different directions at different times.  We have not the information at our disposal which would enable us to trace in detail the devious course of diplomacy in any of the countries of Europe.  What we know something about is the general situation, and the action, in fact, taken at certain moments.  The rest must be, for the present, mainly matter of conjecture.  With this word of caution, let us now proceed to examine the policy of Germany.

The general situation we have already indicated.  We have shown how the armed peace, which is the chronic malady of Europe, had assumed during the ten years from 1904 to 1914 that specially dangerous form which grouped the Great Powers in two opposite camps—­the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente.  We have seen, in the case of Great Britain, France, Russia, and Austria-Hungary, how they came to take their places in that constellation.  We have now to put Germany in its setting in the picture.

Germany, then, in the first place, like the other Powers, had occasion to anticipate war.  It might be made from the West, on the question of Alsace-Lorraine; it might be made from the East, on the question of the Balkans.  In either case, the system of alliances was likely to bring into play other States than those immediately involved, and the German Powers might find themselves attacked on all fronts, while they knew in the latter years that they could not count upon the support of Italy.

A reasonable prudence, if nothing else, must keep Germany armed and apprehensive.  But besides the maintenance of what she had, Germany was now ambitious to secure her share of “world-power.”  Let us examine in what spirit and by what acts she endeavoured to make her claim good.

First, what was the tone of public opinion in Germany during these critical years?

[Footnote 1:  Emile Ollivier, “L’Empire Liberal.”]

8. Opinion in Germany.

Since the outbreak of the war the pamphlet literature in the countries of the Entente has been full of citations from German political writers.  In England, in particular, the names and works of Bernhardi and of Treitschke have become more familiar than they appear to have been in Germany prior to the war.  This method of selecting for polemical purposes certain tendencies of sentiment and theory, and ignoring all others, is one which could be applied, with damaging results, to any country in the world.  Mr. Angell has shown in his “Prussianism in England” how it might be applied to ourselves; and a German, no doubt, into whose hands that book might fall would draw conclusions about public opinion here similar to those which we have drawn about public opinion