before the war, considerations such as these are undoubtedly full of significance, and perhaps the same sort of thing explains a good deal of strong language on the part of the Kaiser about Germany’s capacity in case of war.  It is certain that such utterances did not lessen the feeling of nervousness that filled the international atmosphere.  But the true ground of such nervousness was the policy of the balance of power, which had split Europe into two armed camps full of distrust of each other.  The Ambassadors of the Great Powers knew the Kaiser intimately enough to realize what his intentions, in spite of everything, were, and it required an untruthfulness only explicable by the psychological effect of war to permit the suggestion of a hateful and distorted picture of him as a tyrant seeking for the domination of the world and for war and bloodshed.”

I have translated this passage from the book because I think it is instructive in its disclosure of uneasy self-consciousness on the part of the author.  Obviously, the Emperor made his quiet-loving Minister at times uncomfortable.  I do not doubt that the Emperor really desired peace, just as Herr von Bethmann Hollweg tells us.  Yet he not only indulged himself in warlike talk, but was surrounded by a group of military and naval advisers who were preaching openly that war was inevitable, and were instructing many of the prominent intellectual leaders in their doctrine.  The Emperor may well have been in a difficult situation.  But he was playing with fire when he made such speeches to the world as he frequently did.  I believe him to have most genuinely desired to keep the peace.  But I doubt whether he was willing to pay the price for entry on the only path along which it could have been made secure.  He was a man of many sides, with a genius for speaking winged words as part of his equipment.  He was a dangerous leader for Germany under conditions which had already caused even a Bismarck concern.  The result was that the world took him to be the ally, not of Bethmann Hollweg, but of Tirpitz, and what that meant we shall see when we come to the latter’s book.  I can not say that I think the judgment of the world was other than, to put the matter at its lowest, the natural and probable result of his language, and I find nothing in the ex-Chancellor’s volume to lead me to a different conclusion.

The argument of that volume is that England should never have entered the Entente, for that by doing so she strengthened France and Russia so as to enable them to indulge the will for war.  He assumes that there was this will as beyond doubt.  But suppose England had not entered the Entente, what then?  On Herr von Bethmann Hollweg’s own showing France and Russia would have remained too weak to entertain the hope of success in a conflict with the Triple Alliance.  Germany could, under these circumstances, have herself compelled these Powers to an entente or even an alliance.  England would have been in