Why Germany acted as she did then is a matter that still requires careful investigation.  My own feeling is that she has demonstrated the extreme risk of confiding great political decisions to military advisers.  It is not their business to have the last word in deciding between peace and war.  The problem is too far-reaching for their training.  Bismarck knew this well, and often said it, as students of his life and reflections are aware.  Had he been at the helm I do not believe that he would have allowed his country to drift into a disastrous course.  He was far from perfect in his ethical standards, but he had something of that quality which Mommsen, in his history, attributes to Julius Caesar.  Him the historian describes as one of those “mighty ones who has preserved to the end of his career the statesman’s tact of discriminating between the possible and the impossible, and has not broken down in the task which for greatly gifted natures is the most difficult of all—­the task of recognizing, when on the pinnacle of success, its natural limits.  What was possible he performed, and never left the possible good undone for the sake of the impossible better; never disdained at least to mitigate by palliatives evils that were incurable.  But where he recognized that fate had spoken, he always obeyed.  Alexander on the Hypanis, Napoleon at Moscow, turned back because they were compelled to do so, and were indignant at destiny for bestowing even on its favorites merely limited successes.  Caesar turned back voluntarily on the Thames and on the Rhine, and thought of carrying into effect even at the Danube and the Euphrates, not unbounded plans of world-conquest, but merely well-considered frontier regulations.”

If only Germany, whose great historian thus explained these things, had remembered them, how different might have been her position to-day.  But it may be that she had carried her policy too far to be left free.  With her certainly rests the main responsibility for what has happened; for apart from her, Austria would not have acted as she did, nor would Turkey, nor Bulgaria.  The fascinating glitter of her armies, and the assurances given by her General Staff, were too much for the minor nations whom she had induced to accept her guidance, and too much I think also for her own people.  No doubt the ignorance of these about the ways of their own Government counted for a great deal.  There has never been such a justification of the principle of democratic control as this war affords.  But a nation must be held responsible for the action of its own rulers, however much it has simply submitted itself to them.  I have the impression that even to-day in its misery the German public does not fully understand, and still believes that Germany was the victim of a plot to entrap and encircle her, and that with this in view Russia mobilized on a great scale for war.  It is difficult for us to understand how real the Slav peril appeared to Germany and to Austria, and there