After a few months in Berlin, I came to the conclusion that these pacifists represented at that time (1912) the most widespread but least noisy opinions, the opinions of the majority. By this I mean, not the majority of the governing classes, but the majority of the nation as a whole. The bulk of the population, in fact, the rank and file of industrial workers attached to Socialist or Christian-Democratic unions, the little democratic artisans of the towns, the peasants of the country districts, clung, by instinct as much as by reason, to the peace that allowed them to live and prosper. They dreaded war, because it meant loss of work and wages, and was at best an unknown quantity. No one in Germany feared the other miseries that war brings in its train—invasion, devastation, or famine; for no one, either among the proletariate or among the middle classes, had any doubts of victory. For all that, in this nation of workers, the general desire was not to make conquests, but to go on earning money and getting rich. The statements that I heard from some of the humblest contributors to the nation’s wealth all agreed on this point. Going up the social ladder, we should also reckon among the advocates of peace, I think, most of the manufacturers, great and small, and of the traders, wholesale as well as retail. The industrial employers who depend on borrowed capital—their name is legion in Germany—needed credit, and therefore an unbroken calm. Any external crisis, leading to a stoppage of business, would have made it difficult for them to meet their bills, and if it lasted for some time, would have faced them with the prospect of ruin. Heads of great undertakings who acted as their own bankers foresaw in war a temporary shrinkage in their profits, and the likelihood of being cut off from countries beyond the seas. We should not be doing justice to their insight if we believed that they shared all the illusions of the Imperial Government as to England’s indifference and her complete aloofness from European conflicts. Very different ideas must have flitted across the minds of the great shipowners of Hamburg and Bremen and the directors of the Deutsche Bank and Disconto-Gesellschaft, those enterprising men who were always busily working out fresh projects. The care that they took to reassure their London friends as to the pacific aims of German statesmanship proves to us the value they attached, if not to the peace of Europe, at any rate to the peace of the seas.