Slow to think, and not thinking overmuch, the Russian peasant began to see red whenever he thought of a German. As a whole public thinks, eventually its rulers must think. The upper class of Russia was inclined to fan the flames of the people’s passions. If the people were venting their emotions against the Teuton they would not be developing further revolutions against the old order of things. The military class was prompt to make use of the national tendency to strengthen military resources. By action and reaction across the frontiers the strain was increasing. Germany saw Russia with double her own population and was sensitive to the dangers behind Russia’s ambitions. Russia stood for everything abhorrent to German order and racial feeling. And what of France? There is little to say of her when we assign responsibility. Here was a nation with its population practically stationary; a nation with a closed-in culture; a democracy with its racial and national integrity assured by its own peculiar genius. Visions of conquest had passed from the French mind. Her “place in the sun” was her own sun of France. Her trade was that due to skill in handicraft rather than to any tactics of aggression. At every Hague conference France was for all measures that would assure peace; Germany against every one that might interfere with her military ambition; England against any that might limit her action in defending the seas. The desire for “revenge” for ’70 had died out in the younger generation of Frenchmen. Her stationary population, which chauvinists resented, had solved the problem of expansion. From father to son, she could be content with her thrift, her industry, and her arts, and with the joy of living. For, more than any other European nation, she had that gift: the joy of living. Her armies and her alliances were truly for defence. She could not fight Germany and Austria alone. She must have help. If Russia went to war she, too, must go to war. She acted up to her belief when she held back her armies five miles from the frontier till the German struck; when she gave Germany a start in mobilisation--a start which, with England’s delay, came near being fatal for her. That price she paid for peace; that advantage Germany gained by striking first. It is a hard moral for the pacificists, but one which ought to give the French conscience a cleaner taste in after years.