First of all, she needed trade routes. She needed a way to the sea more open than the Hamburg harbors. She wanted a road to Asia. She wanted to control the gateway to the rich Orient. She wanted an empire that would contain Austria-Hungary as well as Germany proper. And she set out to win it all. In 1914 the situation was this: Francis Joseph, Emperor of Austria, was an old man, a sick man. His empire, composed of scores of nationalities, held together by a thin thread. If he died, it might disintegrate into groups of free peoples. Serbia, its near neighbor, had won independence. The Balkan wars had shifted power to small states that stood between Germany and the Orient. Russia was disaffected. A revolution might come at any time that would dethrone the Czar. Unless a war, and a great war, was started, many and great free nations would soon surround Germany, cutting her off from the way to the Orient. France, her hated neighbor, flaunted her free institutions in her face and remembered Alsace and Lorraine. England cut her off from unrestricted rule of the sea. To be sure, she was not eager to force war with England, since the German navy had not arrived at the point of preparedness of the German army. England could wait until Germany had conquered the rest of Europe. Then, when England was conquered, too, Germany would punish the United States for our “international impertinence” as Bismarck called our policy of the Monroe Doctrine. It was the time to strike. Germany, as usual in the Bismarckian policy, made the occasion. Down in Bosnia, a Balkan state which Austria had seized and held against the will of its people, an anarchist threw a bomb which killed an Austrian archduke in June, 1914. For a time no action came of the happening. Then Austria announced that she had discovered that the assassination was the result of a Serbian plot, known to the Serbian Government, Bosnia’s neighbor and the friend of her freedom. Therefore she declared war on Serbia. Germany gave her consent to the ultimatum. She was taking her opportunity. Knowing that a war of Austria against Serbia would open a way for her own progress toward the East, Germany, being prepared to the last gun and last man, forced the issue. She knew that Russia would rise against her, but she knew, better than the Russian Government did, how unprepared Russia was. On the first day of August, 1914, she declared war against Russia. On the fourth day of August the _Reichstag_, the people’s legislative body of Germany, met and for the first time learned officially of what had been done. By that time the German Government had put itself in a position of war against Russia, France, Great Britain, and Belgium, a fact which proves how little the German people had to say about the making of actual warfare.