[6] When England came in, the merchants of Germany were very down-hearted, for they saw all their over-seas trade cut off at a blow.  But the Junkers called together the leading merchants and bribed them with promises.  In the year 1918 one of the prominent manufacturers of Germany made a statement which got out and was published in the countries of the Entente.  After telling how the blame for the war was to be laid at the door of the land-owning, military class, he confessed that he personally had been bribed to support the war by the promise of thirty thousand acres of Australian land, which was to be given to him after Germany had conquered the world.  This, of course, was pure piracy; the motto of Prussia for some time had been that piracy pays.

There was one class of manufacturers who did not lose trade, but gained it through a war.  This was composed of the makers of guns and munitions.  They were clamorously back of the Junkers in their demands for war.  These people profited by preparation for war.  They kept inventing newer and stronger guns so that the weapons which they had sold the governments one year would be out-of-date the next, ready to be thrown on the scrap heap.  In this way, the factories were kept working over-time and their profits were enormous.  This money, of course, came out of the taxes of the common people.

Their surplus profits the munition makers invested sometimes in newspapers.  It was proved in the German Reichstag in 1913 that the great gun-makers of Prussia had a force of hired newspaper writers to keep up threats of war.  They paid certain papers in Paris to print articles to make the French people think that the Germans were about to attack them.  These same gun-makers in Berlin tried to persuade the German people that the French were on the point of attacking them.

All of this played into the hands of the Junkers by making people all over Europe feel that war could not be avoided.  Thus when the Junkers were ready to strike and the great war broke out, people would say, “At last it has come, the war that we knew was inevitable.”

Questions for Review

 1.  Why did Germany decline to take a “naval holiday”?
 2.  What is meant by “strategic railroads”?
 3.  Why were the military leaders alarmed at the growth of the
    Socialist Party?
 4.  What was the fate of popular government in Russia?
 5.  How did the Junkers owe their power to the feudal system?
 6.  How were the German merchants won over to war?
 7.  What part had the gun-makers in bringing on war?

CHAPTER XVII

  The Spark that Exploded the Magazine

The year 1914.—­England’s troubles.—­Plots for a “Greater Serbia.”—­The hated archduke.—­The shot whose echoes shook the whole world.—­Austria’s extreme demands.—­Russia threatens.—­Frantic attempts to prevent war.—­Mobilizing on both sides.—­Germany’s tiger-like spring.—­The forts of the Vosges Mountains.—­The other path to Paris.—­The neutrality of Belgium.—­Belgium defends herself.