Between diplomats, colonial officials, manufacturers, shippers, etc., I could mention at least a score of Germans of outstanding prominence whom I heard express views so nearly identical with those already quoted that it will hardly be worth while setting them down here. (These would include, I may say, two men who have rendered important service—one politically and the other as an engineer—to the Kaiser in Asiatic Turkey, and another—whom I had met in East Africa and Samoa—who is a member of the present Cabinet, and, moreover, prominently mentioned for the ‘reconstruction period’ Premiership.) Among all of these there was not a single individual who did not have a far clearer comprehension of ‘world problems’—a less ‘warped’ international perspective—than the Kaiser (from the very one-sidedness of his life) could possibly have had. They may be taken as thoroughly representative of the very small class of Germans whose minds and observations had been sufficiently broad to have made their opinions and admonitions worth heeding. No less ‘Deutschland-über-Alles’ than the Kaiser himself, theirs was a practical policy which might have succeeded, while his was a mad piece of international adventuring that not only marked the Kaiser himself for a fall, but—since his country elected to follow him—also made inevitable the downfall of Germany. Had counsellors of this type been heeded, there is little doubt that _welt-politik_ would have been exercised in a manner that would have prevented its becoming, for many years at least, the veritable boomerang into which the Kaiser’s inordinate vanity, cynicism and hot-headedness have converted it. From Great Britain’s standpoint, however, there can be no doubt that it was best that the ‘Imperial Bungler’ should have been allowed to have his own way, that the ‘showdown’ should have been forced at the time it was. The Germany of a decade from now would have been far richer, far more wonderful, far more difficult to defeat than the Germany of to-day. Just as I have heard so many far-sighted Germans say in the course of the last decade, the Kaiser, with his ‘shining armour’ and his trumpetings, has, in the end, only played into the hands of his enemies by awakening the lion which he might have netted—had, indeed, already half netted—in its sleep.