The peoples of Europe knew nothing of the forces which had led up to the conflict. They had never been told about the secret treaties—made by statesmen of the old school without their consent, though their lives were pledged in them—by which the Foreign Offices of Europe had played against each other for high stakes in a dangerous game called the Balance of Power. They were ignorant of the rivalries and greeds which had been inflamed for half a century by the rush for Africa, where France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Great Britain had bargained and intrigued and quarrelled with each other for slices of the Dark Continent which had put a black spell upon the imagination of Imperialists in all these countries. They did not know that German Imperialists believed, not without reason, that England and France had squared each other in order to prevent German influence in Morocco, and that she felt herself thwarted by the two powers in all her ambitions for “a place in the sun,” for the sources of raw material, and for the expansion of her trade. They were ignorant of Pan-German dreams of dominant power in Middle Europe, and of an Asiatic Empire following the line of Berlin to Bagdad. They were not aware of Pan-Slav ambitions cutting clean across Pan-German ambitions and looking forward to a future when the Russian Tsardom would have its second capital in Constantinople, and when the Russian race would stretch through Serbia to the Adriatic Sea. They had never realised the meaning of the Balkan Wars of 1912, when Russia was behind Serbia and Germany behind Turkey, in the first skirmish for these rival schemes. They were never told by their leaders that explosive forces were being stored up in Europe because of the rival Imperialisms which sooner or later were bound to result in infernal fire shattering the whole structure of European life.