I have no higher aspiration, as far as this volume is concerned, than that critics of it, hostile or friendly, may pronounce it "pro-Ally" from start to finish. I shall survive even the charge that it is "pro-English." I mean it to be all of that, as I have tried to breathe sincerity into every line of it. But I shall not feel inclined to accept without protest an accusation that the book is "anti-German." It is true that I regard this essentially a German-made, or rather a Prussian-made, war, and that I hold Prussian militarism and militarists solely responsible for plunging the world into this unending bath of blood and tears. It is true that I wish to see Germany beaten. I wish her beaten for the Allies’ sake and for my own country’s sake. A victorious Germany would be a menace to international liberty and become automatically a threat to the happiness and freedom of the United States. My years in Germany taught me that. But I cherish no scintilla of hatred or animosity toward the German people as individuals, who will be the real victims of the war. I saw them with my own eyes literally dragged into the fight against their will, fears and judgment. I know from their own lips that they considered it a cruelly unnecessary war and did not want it. They were joyful and prosperous a year and a half ago--never more so. They craved a continuance of the simple blessings of peace, unless their tearful protestations in the fateful month preceding the drawing of their mighty sword were the plaints of a race of hypocrites, and I do not think the percentage of hypocrisy higher in Germany, man for man, than elsewhere in the world. The German’s _Gott strafe England_ cult, for example, is no revelation to any man who has lived among them. Their hatred for Perfidious Albion has long been vigorous and purposeful. During the war I have lived in Germany, England and the United States--a week of it in Berlin, three months at different periods in America, and the rest of the time in London. My observations of Germany have not been confined to the six and a half days the Prussian police permitted me to tarry in their midst, for my work in London has dealt almost exclusively with day-by-day examination of that weird production which will be known to history as the German war-time Press. I am quite sure the perspective of the life and times of the Kaiser’s people in their "great hour" was clearer from the vantage-ground of a newspaper desk near the Thames embankment than it could possibly have been had it been my lot to view the Fatherland at war as an observer writing, under the hypnotic influence of mass-suggestion, of Germany from within.