I know it, because the week following the outbreak of the war I saw a letter just arrived from a gentleman in high position in Austria, connected with the Austrian Foreign Office, in which, writing to New York under date of about July 20, 1914, he said: "We are now passing through a nerve-wearing time because of our difficulty with Serbia, but by the time this letter reaches you everything will be all right again. The Serbians have been intriguing against us these many years, and this time they must be settled with for good and all. We shall go in and take Belgrade, but inasmuch as we have given assurance to Russia that we shall not permanently interfere with the integrity and independence of Serbia, and inasmuch as neither Russia nor her allies are ready to fight, the whole thing will be a military promenade and will have no serious consequences." A defensive war! Was it a defensive war which Prussianism was thinking of when it declined England's repeated offer for a reduction by both countries of the building of warships; when it refused at the last Hague conference to discuss the limitation of standing armies and armaments; when Germany--alone amongst the great nations--rejected our offer of a treaty of arbitration? Years before the war, Nietzsche, than whom no man had greater influence in shaping the trend of German thought in the past thirty years, wrote: "You shall love peace as a means to prepare for new wars. You say that a good cause may hallow even war, but I say to you that it is a good war which hallows every cause." On July 29, 1914, the well-informed German newspaper, _Vorwaerts_, declared: "The camarilla of war-lords is working with absolutely unscrupulous means to carry out their fearful designs to precipitate a world war." In October, 1914, three months after the outbreak of the war, Maximilian Harden, one of the ablest and most influential of German publicists, wrote: "Let us renounce those miserable efforts to excuse the actions of Germany in declaring war. It is not against our will that we have thrown ourselves into this gigantic adventure. The war has not been imposed upon us by others and by surprise. We have willed the war. It was our duty to will it. We decline to appear before the tribunal of united Europe. We reject its jurisdiction. One principle alone counts and no other--one principle which contains and sums up all the others--_might_."