One thing that seemed to me essential for the preservation of good relations was that cordial and frequent intercourse between the people of the two countries should be encouraged and developed.  I set myself in my speeches to avoid all expressions which might be construed as suggesting a critical attitude on our part, or a failure to recognize the existence of peaceful ideas among what was then, as I still think, a large majority of the people of Germany.  The attitude of some newspapers in England, and still more that of the chauvinist minority in Germany itself, did not render this quite an easy task.  But there were good people in these days in Germany as well as in England, and the United States might be counted on as likely to co-operate in discouraging friction.

Meanwhile there was the chance that the course of this policy might be interrupted by some event which we could not control.  A conversation with the then Chief of the German General Staff, General von Moltke, the nephew of the great man of that name, satisfied me that he did not really look with any pleasurable military expectation to the results of a war with the United Kingdom alone.  It would, he observed to me, be in his opinion a long and possibly indecisive war, and must result in much of the overseas trade of both countries passing to a tertius gaudens, by which he meant the United States.

I had little doubt that what he said to me on this occasion represented his real opinion.  But I had in my mind the apprehension of an emergency of a different nature.  Germany was more likely to attack France than ourselves.  The German Emperor had told me that, altho he was trying to develop good relations with France, he was finding it difficult.  This seemed to me ominous.  The paradox presented itself that a war with Germany in which we were alone would be easier to meet than a war in which France was attacked along with us; for if Germany succeeded in over-running France she might establish naval bases on the northern Channel ports of that country, quite close to our shores, and so, with the possible aid of the submarines, long-range guns and air-machines of the future, interfere materially with our naval position in the Channel and our fleet defenses against invasion.

I knew, too, that the French Government was apprehensive.  In the historical speech which Sir Edward Grey made on August 3, 1914, the day before the British Government directed Sir Edward Goschen, our Ambassador in Berlin, to ask for his passports, he informed the House of Commons that so early as January, 1906, the French Government, after the Morocco difficulty, had drawn his attention to the international situation.  It had informed him that it considered the danger of an attack on France by Germany to be a real one, and had inquired whether, in the event of an unprovoked attack, Great Britain would think that she had so much at stake as to make her willing to join in resisting