What, it may however be asked, of the Morocco adventure?  Of the speech at Tangier?  Of the sending of the Panther to Agadir?  Of the demand for compensation in Central Africa?  Until the Morocco question arose, all the quarrels amongst the Powers regarding territory were caused by the territorial ambition of France, or Russia, or Italy—­not of Germany; and it was not until France showed openly, by sending her troops to Fez, and thus ignoring the Act of Algeciras, that Germany put forward claims for territorial compensation in connection with Morocco.  The visit of the Emperor to Tangier in 1905, a year after the Anglo-French Agreement, was doubtless an unpleasant surprise for both England and France.  And not without good cause; for England and France are naturally and historically Mediterranean Powers—­the one as guardian of the route to her Eastern possessions, the other as the owners of a large extent of Mediterranean coast; while England, in addition, was justified in seeing with uneasiness the possibility of a German settlement at Tangier or elsewhere on the Morocco seaboard.  But the Tangier visit and all that followed it was the consequence, not of an adventurous policy of territorial conquest, but of a legitimate, and not wholly selfish, desire for economic expansion.

Taken, then, as a whole, the Emperor’s foreign policy has been, as it is to-day, almost entirely economic and commercial.  The same might, no doubt, be said in a general way of all civilized Occidental governments, but there never has yet been a country of which the foreign policy was so completely directed by the economic and mercantile spirit as modern Germany.  The foreign policy of England has also been commercial, but it has been influenced at times by noble sentiment and splendid imagination as well.  The first question the German statesman, in whose vocabulary of state-craft the word imagination does not occur, asks himself and other nations when any event happens abroad to demand imperial attention is—­how does it affect Germany’s economic and commercial interests, future as well as present?  What is Germany going to get out of it?  The manner in which on various occasions during the reign the question has been propounded has excited criticism bordering on indignation abroad, but it should be recognized that it has invariably been answered in the long run by Germany in the spirit of compromise and conciliation.

However, all civilized nations nowadays see that war is the least satisfactory method of adjusting national quarrels, and the tendency is happily growing among them to pursue a commercial, an economic policy, a policy of peace.  This is true Weltpolitik, true world-policy.  Time was when wars were the unavoidable result of conditions then prevailing; but conditions have greatly altered, and war, as there is abundant evidence to show, is to-day, in almost every case, avoidable by all civilized peoples.  Formerly war deranged and disturbed at any rate for the time being,