All this the late Imperial Chancellor in substance ignores.  The fact is that he can only defend his theory on the hypothesis that no such policy as that of his colleague was on foot, and that the truth was that France, Russia, and England had come to a decision to take the initiative in a policy embracing, for France revenge for the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, for Russia the acquisition of Constantinople with domination over the Balkans and the Bosporus, and for England the destruction of German commerce.  If this hypothesis be not true, and the real explanation of the alarm of the Entente Powers was the policy exemplified by Tirpitz and the other exponents of German militarism, then the whole of the reasoning in Herr von Bethmann Hollweg’s book falls to the ground.

It may be asked how it was possible that two members of the Imperial Government should have been pursuing in the same period two policies wholly inconsistent with each other.  The answer is not difficult.  The direction of affairs in Germany was admirably organized for some purposes and very badly for others.  Her autocratic system lent itself to efficiency in the preparation of armaments.  But it was not really a system under which her Emperor was left free to guide policy.  There is no greater mistake made than that under which it is popularly supposed that the Emperor was absolute master.  The development in recent years of the influence of the General and Admiral Staffs, which was a necessity from the point of view of modern organization for war but required keeping in careful check from other points of view, had produced forces which the Emperor was powerless to hold in.  Even in Bismarck’s time readers of his “Reflections and Recollections” will remember how he felt the embarrassment of his foreign policy caused by the growing and deflecting influences of Moltke, and even of his friend Roon.  And there was no Bismarck to hold the Staffs in check for reasons of expediency in the years before 1914.  The military mind when it is highly developed is dangerous.  It sees only its own bit, but this it sees with great clearness, and in consequence becomes very powerful.  There is only one way of holding it to its legitimate function, and that is by the supremacy of public opinion in a Parliament as its final exponent.  Parliaments may be clumsy and at times ignorant.  But they do express, it may be vaguely, but yet sufficiently, the sense of the people at large.  Now, notwithstanding all that had been done to educate them up to it, I do not think that the people at large in Germany had ever endorsed the implications of the policy of German militarism.  The Social Democrats certainly had not.  They ought, I think, to be judged even now by what they said before the war, and not by what some, tho not all of them, said when it was pressed on them in 1914 that Germany had to fight for her life.  Had she possessed a true Parliamentary system for a generation before the war there would probably have been no war.  What has happened to her is a vindication of Democracy as the best political system despite certain drawbacks which attach to it.