A minority drawn from the intellectual and governing castes, dreaming of victory and aggrandisement, with a passionate desire to see the colossal fabric of German supremacy towering to the heavens, steeped in a limitless hatred or disdain for those who have not the honour to be Germans. From the very opening of hostilities, the morbid conceit of the scholars and men of science was unveiled in clear outlines through those amazing manifestoes on the rights that the superior science, organization, strength, and culture of Germany empower her to claim. In my opinion, however, it would be a mistake to look upon this select band as typical of the nation, just as it would be wrong to make all Germany answerable for the misdeeds of her brutal soldiery, and for the frightful war waged by the military and naval chiefs. Disheartening rebuffs to German and Austro-Hungarian diplomacy both in Morocco and the Near East, where, despite all the efforts of Berlin and Vienna, there arose a state of things inimical to the spread, nay even to the prestige, of Germanism. As a result of these checks, a vast increase of military preparations, while at the same time the war parties in Germany (and in Austria-Hungary too) raged and clamoured more than ever—warning symptoms, to which public opinion abroad, misled by the peaceful solution of the previous crisis, paid but a half-hearted attention. All these causes, individual or collective, whirling us abruptly—on the morrow of a murder that a little police precaution would have averted—to the brink of an abyss in which the freedom of Europe has come near to being engulfed for ever.... Such is the complicated picture that I have tried to sketch, with as a background the crimes committed against Belgium and Serbia. I hope that I may be pardoned for closing this book with a few words on the subject of my gallant country. Civilization is not a unique, exotic plant, the product of _Kultur_, of a chosen people, but a cluster of varied flowers, grown on varied soils, and the most modest of them are not the least hardy nor the least beautiful. From the standpoint of human progress, the existence of small States, contributing to that progress, has justified itself as essential to the needs of mankind. Some have been fruitful fields for experiment in the introducing or the improving of various social or political systems. Others have outstripped nations far larger than themselves in the universal realm of literature and the fine arts; others on the broad path of industrial competition. In these and other domains, how many deathless glories can one of them show on the long and illustrious scroll of its history!