Breed more Germans; keep them fed, clothed, employed, organised industrially, educated! Don’t relieve the economic pressure by emigration or by lowering the birth rate! Keep up the military spirit! Develop the money spirit! Instilled with loyalty to the Kaiser, with a sense of superiority in industry and training as well as of racial superiority, the German felt himself the victim of a world injustice. He saw complacent England living on the fat of empire. He saw America with its rich resources and lack of civil organisation and discipline and its waste individual effort. If the United States only would not play the dog in the manger! If Germany could apply the magic of her system to Mexico or Central America, what tribute that would bring home to Berlin! Consider organised German industrialism working India for all that it was worth! Or Zanzibar! Or the Straits Settlements! Germany had the restless ambition, with an undercurrent of resentment, of the young manager with modern methods who wants to supplant the old manager and his old-fogy methods--an old manager set in his way, but a very kindly, sound old manager, to whose ways the world had grown accustomed. Taxes for armament, and particularly for that new navy, lay heavily on Germany, too. Driving the wedge by peaceful means became increasingly difficult. It needed the blow of war to split open the way to rich fields. The war spirit lost nothing by Germany’s sense of isolation. For this isolation England was to blame; she and the alliances which King Edward had formed around her. England was to blame for everything. Germany could not be to blame for anything. The national rival is always the scapegoat of patriotism. So Germany prepared to strike, as one prepares to build and open a store or to put on a play. Where forty years ago the Englishman, with his aggressive ways, was the unpopular traveller in Europe, the German had become most disliked. In Italy, with his expanding industry, he ran many hotels. His success and his personal manners combined to make the sensitive Italian loathe him. Thus, he sowed the seed of popular feeling which broke in a wave that forced Italy into the war. Germany thought of England as too selfish and cunning in her complacency really to come to the aid of France and Russia. She would stay out; and had she stayed out, Germany would have crushed Russia and then turned on France. But Germany did not know England any better than England knew Germany. The jaundiced mists of chauvinism kept even high leaders from seeing their adversaries clearly.