Because they have for three months been busily reading their morning, noon, and evening editions, they think they have a special call to speak.  Without knowledge of things that have transpired before, without knowledge of the persons concerned, without a suspicion of the needs of the situation and its possibilities, they judge the peoples of the earth and divide the world.  Stupid talk, with which irreverent officiousness seeks to while away and shorten the period of anxious waiting for customers; but to prepare quietly and wisely and mightily in advance for terms of peace, that is the duty of the statesman.

We are waging this war not in order to punish those who have sinned, nor in order to free enslaved peoples and thereafter to comfort ourselves with the unselfish and useless consciousness of our own righteousness.  We wage it from the lofty point of view and with the conviction that Germany, as a result of her achievements and in proportion to them, is justified in asking, and must obtain, wider room on earth for development and for working out the possibilities that are in her.  The powers from whom she forced her ascendency, in spite of themselves, still live, and some of them have recovered from the weakening she gave them.  Spain and the Netherlands, Rome and Hapsburg, France and England, possessed and settled and ruled great stretches of the most fruitful soil.  Now strikes the hour for Germany’s rising power.  The terms of a peace treaty that does not insure this would leave the great effort unrewarded.  Even if it brought dozens of shining billions into the National Treasury, the fate of Europe would be dependent upon the United States of America.

We are waging war for ourselves alone; and still we are convinced that all who desire the good would soon be able to rejoice in the result.  For with this war there must also end the politics that have frightened away all the upright from entering into intimate relations with the most powerful Continental empire.  We need land, free roads into the ocean, and for the spirit and language and wares and trade of Germany we need the same values that are accorded such goods anywhere else.

Only four persons not residents of Essen knew about the new mortar which the firm of Friedrich Krupp manufactured at its own expense and which later, because its shell rapidly smashed the strongest fortifications of reinforced concrete, our military authorities promptly acquired.  Must we be ashamed of this instrument of destruction and take from the lips of the “cultured world” the wry reproach that from “Faust” and the Ninth Symphony we have sunk our national pride to the 42-centimeter guns?  No!  Only firm will and determination to achieve, that is to say, German power, distinguishes the host of warriors now embattled on the five huge fields of blood from the race of the poets and thinkers.  Their brains, too, yearn back, throbbing for the realm of the muses.  Before the remains of the Netherland Gothic, before