The two volumes are profoundly interesting.  For in that of Admiral Tirpitz we have the doctrine set forth that in the end led to the war.  In that written by the late Imperial Chancellor we have quite another principle laid down as the one which he was endeavoring to apply in his direction of German policy.  But in this endeavor he failed.  The school of Tirpitz in the main prevailed, and this was the more easy, inasmuch as it was simply continuing the policy which had been advocated by a noisy section of Germans, nearly without a break, since the days of Frederick the Great.  It was a policy which had in reality outlived the days in which it was practicable.  The world had become too crowded and too small to permit of any one Power asserting its right to jostle its way where it pleased without regard to its neighbors.  An affair of police on a colossal scale had begun to look as if it would ensue, and ensue it ultimately did.  No doubt had we all been cleverer we might have been able to explain to Germany whither she was heading.  But we did not understand her, least of all our chauvinists, nor did she understand us.  In the main what she really wanted was to develop herself by the application of her talent for commerce and industry.  To her success in attaining this end we had no objection, provided her procedure was decent and in order.  But she chose a means to her end which was becoming progressively more and more inadmissible.  Tirpitz describes the illegitimate means.  Bethmann Hollweg describes the legitimate end.  Tirpitz thinks Bethmann Hollweg was a weakling because he would not back up the means.  Bethmann Hollweg, firm in his faith that the end was legitimate and thinking of this alone, dwells on it with little reference to what his colleague was about.  His accusation against the Entente Powers is that, at the instigation of Russia primarily, and in a less degree of France, they set themselves to ring round and crush Germany.  It was really, he believes, a war of aggression, and England was ultimately responsible for it.  Without her co-operation it was impossible, and altho she did not enter into any formal military alliance for the purpose, she began in the time of Edward VII. a policy of close friendship which enabled Russia and France in the end to reckon on her as morally bound to help.  It was easy for these Powers to represent as a defensive war what was really a war of aggression.  Such was truly its nature, and England decided to join in it, actually because she was jealous of Germany’s growing success in the world, and was desirous of setting a check to it.