You can imagine, gentlemen, for yourselves how such a state of things must weaken a Minister's hands. And, thirdly, our dependence was due to the state of our finances. In order to keep up our credit we were drawing a hundred million marks a month from Germany, a sum which during the course of the war has grown to over four milliards; and this money was as urgently needed as were the German divisions and the German bread. And, despite this position of dependence, the only way to arrive at peace was by leading Germany into our own political course; that is to say, persuading Germany to conclude a peace involving sacrifice. _The situation all through was simply this: that any momentary military success might enable us to propose terms of peace which, while entailing considerable loss to ourselves, had just a chance of being accepted by the enemy._ The German military party, on the other hand, increased their demands with every victory, and it was more hopeless than ever, after their great successes, to persuade them to adopt a policy of renunciation. I think, by the way, that there was a single moment in the history of this war when such an action would have had some prospect of success. I refer to the famous battle of Goerlitz. Then, with the Russian army in flight, the Russian forts falling like houses of cards, many among our enemies changed their point of view. I was at that time still our representative in Roumania. Majorescu was then not disinclined to side with us actively, and the Roumanian army moved forward toward Bessarabia, could have been hot on the heels of the flying Russians, and might, according to all human calculations, have brought about a complete debacle. It is not unlikely that the collapse which later took place in Russia might have come about then, and after a success of that nature, with no "America" as yet on the horizon, we might perhaps have brought the war to an end. Two things, however, were required: in the first place, the Roumanians demanded, as the price of their co-operation, a rectification of the Hungarian frontier, and this first condition was flatly refused by Hungary; the second condition, which naturally then did not come into question at all, would have been that we should even then, after such a success, have proved strong enough to bear a peace with sacrifice. We were not called upon to agree to this, but the second requirement would undoubtedly have been refused by Germany, just as the first had been by Hungary. I do not positively assert that peace would have been possible in this or any other case, but I do positively maintain that during my period of office _such a peace by sacrifice was the utmost we and Germany could have attained_. The future will show what superhuman efforts we have made to induce Germany to give way. That all proved fruitless was not the fault of the German people, nor was it, in my opinion, the fault of the German Emperor, but that of the