When Rapacity moves into the next house, it is time to lock your cellar door. Yoke up insatiable Appetite with colossal Egotism, and the inevitable runaway is only a question of time. While enjoying the benefits of an industrial prosperity and a world-wide commerce that had won the admiration of the world, the Germans complained about being denied their "place in the sun"; and they reached out after world supremacy. England and the United States were like twin thorns in the side of the Kaiser and the German people at large. The pan-Germanists busily plotted against both those nations. Concerning England, a distinguished German-born citizen of New York, Mr. Otto H. Kahn, wrote to a relative in Germany (June 28, 1915) as follows: "England has not abused her power at sea, ... any more than previous to the present war you have abused your power on land. Not only has she not stood in the way of your development, but =on the contrary she has given you fair and free access to her markets, with unparalleled liberality=." In fact, it was so "unparalleled" that by August, 1914, German commercial houses had crowded out of Singapore every British house save two! Wherever the British flag went, prior to the war, along with it went the German trader. But, like the horseleech, Germany's cry was for "More"; and to get it "=British sea power must be crushed!=" Unmitigated rapacity, in men or in nations, ever has been and always will be a colossal blunder. 3. THE BLUNDER OF WORLD-WIDE TREACHERY. While America was sound asleep in the lap of Peace, and England slumbered with only her sea eye open, Germany armed herself to the teeth, and planted throughout England, France, America, Belgium, Holland, Russia and India the most colossal spy-and-traitor system ever developed. She secretly armed her African colonies so that on receipt of the famous "Willie-is-ill" telegram, each one of her colonies instantly was ready to fight. In 1911, while crossing Lake Tanganyika, Central Africa, on a steamer, an American lady said to a German officer who sat beside her at the dinner table, "Have you and your comrade been shooting?" "Not =yet=!" said the officer, significantly; whereat his brother officer laughed heartily, as if at a good joke. Later it became known that the business of those two officers was the supplying of machine guns to German East Africa. And still later it was learned that those guns were shipped to Dar-es-Salaam in piano-boxes, marked "Pianos." No wonder Dar-es-Salaam was so ready to begin fighting on August 2, 1914! There are times when the blunderings of German "statesmen" are so crude and raw that, when they harm no one, they are comical. Even amid the horrors of war all America is laughing over the wholesale discomfiture and final undoing of Dr. Dumba, Papen, Boy-Ed (an anything-but-precocious Boy), and Bernstorff, by a restless American newspaper man with a taste for amateur detective work after amateur crooks.