is little doubt that to the latter Serbia was an unquiet neighbor.  But these considerations must be taken in their context—­a context of which the German public ought to have made itself fully aware.  The leaders of its opinion were bent on domination to the Near East.  No wonder that the Slavs in the Balkan Peninsula became progressively alarmed, and looked to Russia more and more for protection.  For it had become plain that moral considerations would not be allowed by the authorities at Berlin to weigh in the balance against material advantages to be gained by power of domination.

If there is room for reproach to us Anglo-Saxons, it is reproach of a very different kind.  Germany was quite intelligent enough to listen to reason, and, besides, she had the prospect of becoming the dominating industrial and commercial power in the world by dint merely of peaceful penetration.  It is possible that, if her relations with her Western neighbors, including Great Britain, had been more intimate than they actually were, she might have been saved from a great blunder, and might have come to understand that the English-speaking races were not really so inferior to herself as she took them to be.  Her hubris was in part, at all events, the result of ignorance.  Speaking for my own countrymen, I think that neither did we know enough about the Germans nor did the Germans know enough about us.  They were ignorant of the innate capacity for fighting, in industrial and military conflicts alike, which our history shows we have always hitherto brought to light in great emergencies.  And they little realized how tremendously moral issues could stir and unite democracies.  We, on the other hand, knew little of their tradition, their literature, or their philosophy.  Our statesmen did not read their newspapers, and rarely visited their country.  We were deficient in that quality which President Murray Butler has spoken of as the “international mind.”

I do not know whether, had it been otherwise, we could have brought about the better state of things in Europe for which I tried to express the hope, altho not without misgiving, in the address on “Higher Nationality” which I was privileged to deliver before distinguished representatives of the United States and of Canada at Montreal on September 1, 1913.  I spoke then of the possibility of a larger entente, an entente which might become a real concert of the Great Powers of the world; and I quoted the great prayer with which Grotius concludes his book on “War and Peace.”  There was at least the chance, if we strove hard enough, that we might find a response from the best in other countries, and in the end attain to a new and real Sittlichkeit which should provide a firmer basis for International Law and reverence for international obligations.  But for the realization of this dream a sustained and strenuous search after fuller mutual knowledge was required.

After this address had been published, I received a letter from the German Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, in which—­writing in German and so late as September 26, 1913—­he expressed himself to me as follows: