to contemplate, and prepared her people to uphold, a direct challenge to all her rivals.  The object of this challenge was to win for Germany her due share in the non-European world, her ‘place in the sun.’  Her view of what that share must be was such that it could not be attained without the overthrow of all her European rivals, and this would bring with it the lordship of the worid.  It must be all or nothing.  Though not quite realising this alternative, the mind of Germany was not afraid of it.  She was in the mood to make a bold attempt, if need be, to grasp even the sceptre of world-supremacy.  The world could not believe that any sane people could entertain such megalomaniac visions; not even the events of the decade 1904-14 were enough to bring conviction; it needed the tragedy and desolation of the war to prove at once their reality and their folly.  For they were folly even if they could be momentarily realised.  They sprang from the traditions of Prussia, which seemed to demonstrate that all things were possible to him who dared all, and scrupled nothing, and calculated his chances and his means with precision.  By force and fraud the greatness of Prussia had been built; by force and fraud Prussia-Germany had become the leading state of Europe, feared by all her rivals and safe from all attack.  Force and fraud appeared to be the determining factors in human affairs; even the philosophers of Germany devoted their powers to justifying and glorifying them.  By force and fraud, aided by science, Germany should become the leader of the world, and perhaps its mistress.  Never has the doctrine of power been proclaimed with more unflinching directness as the sole and sufficient motive for state action.  There was practically no pretence that Germany desired to improve the condition of the lands she wished to possess, or that they were misgoverned, or that the existing German territories were threatened:  what pretence there was, was invented after war began.  The sole and sufficient reason put forward by the advocates of the policy which Germany was pursuing was that she wanted more power and larger dominions; and what she wanted she proposed to take

On the surface it seemed mere madness for the least and latest of the great empires to challenge all the rest, just as it had once seemed madness for Frederick the Great, with his little state, to stand up against all but one of the great European powers.  But Germany had calculated her chances, and knew that there were many things in her favour.  She knew that in the last resort the strength of the world-states rested upon their European foundations, and here the inequality was much less.  In a European struggle she could draw great advantage from her central geographical position, which she had improved to the highest extent by the construction of a great system of strategic railways.  She could trust to her superbly organised military system, more perfect than that of any other state, just because no other state has ever regarded