The great defect of the German Imperial system was that, unless the Emperor was strong enough to impose his will on his advisers, he was largely at their mercy.  Had they been chosen by the people, the people and not the Emperor would have borne the responsibility, if the views of these advisers diverged from their own.  But they were chosen by the Emperor, and chosen in varying moods as to policy.  The result was that, excellent as were the departments at their special work in most cases, on general policy there was no guarantee for unity of mind.  The Emperor lived amid a sea of conflicting opinions.  The Chancellor might have one idea, the Foreign Secretary, a Prussian and not Imperial Minister, a different one, the Chief of the General Staff a third, the War Minister a fourth, and the Head of the Admiralty a fifth.  Thus the Kaiser was constantly being pulled at from different sides, and whichever Minister had the most powerful combination at his back generally got the best of the argument.  Were the Kaiser in an impulsive mood he might side now with one and again with another, and the result would necessarily be confusion.  Moreover, he had constantly to fix one eye on public opinion in Germany, and another on public opinion abroad.  It is therefore not surprising that Germany seemed to foreigners a strange and unintelligible country, and that sudden manifestations of policy were made which shocked us here, accustomed as we were to something quite different.  Neither our pacifists nor our chauvinists really succeeded in diagnosing Germany.  On the other hand, we ourselves were a standing puzzle to the Germans.  They could not understand how Government could be conducted in the absence of abstract principles exactly laid down.  And because our democratic system was one of choosing our rulers and trusting them with a large discretion within limits, the Germans always suspected that this system, with which they were unfamiliar, covered a device for concealing hidden policies.  I wrote in some detail about this in an address delivered at Oxford in the autumn of 1911, and afterward published in a little volume called “Universities and National Life.”

The war has not altered the views to which I had then come.

But it was not really so on either side, and it is deplorable that the two nations knew so little of each other.  For I believe that the German system, wholly unadapted as it was to the modern spirit, was bound to become modified before long, and had we shown more skill and more zeal in explaining ourselves, we should probably have accelerated the process of German acceptance of the true tendencies of the age.  But our statesmen took little trouble to get first-hand knowledge of the genesis of what appeared to them to be the German double dose of original sin, and, on the other hand, our chauvinists were studied in Germany out of all proportion to their small number and influence.  Thus the Berlin politicians got the wrong notions to which their tradition predisposed