If it be asked why England and Belgium were thus in 1906 and 1912 considering the contingency of a German invasion of Belgium and the method of effectually repelling it, the reply is obvious that such invasion, in the event of a war between Germany and France, was a commonplace of German military strategists. Of this purpose they made little, if any, concealment. The construction by Germany of numerous strategic railway lines on the Belgian frontier, which were out of proportion to the economic necessity of the territory, gave to Europe some indication of Germany's purpose and there could have been little doubt as to such intention, if Germany had not, through its Foreign Office, given, as previously shown, repeated and continuous assurances to Belgium that such was not its intention. The German Chancellor--whose stupendous blunders of speech and action in this crisis will be the marvel of posterity--has further attempted to correct his record by two equally disingenuous defenses. Speaking to the Reichstag on December 2, 1914, he said: When on the 4th of August I referred to the wrong which we were doing in marching through Belgium, it was not yet known for certain whether the Brussels Government in the hour of need would not decide after all to spare the country and to retire to Antwerp under protest. You remember that, after the occupation of Liége, at the request of our army leaders I repeated the offer to the Belgian Government. For military reasons it was absolutely imperative that at the time, about the 4th of August, the possibility for such a development should be kept open. _Even then the guilt of the Belgian Government was apparent from many a sign, although I had not yet any positive documentary proofs at my disposal._ This is much too vague to excuse a great crime. The guilt of Belgium is said to be "apparent from many a sign," but what these signs are the Chancellor still fails to state. He admits that they were not documentary in character. If the guilt of Belgium had been so apparent to the Chancellor on August the 4th, when he made his confession of wrong doing in the Reichstag, then it is incredible that he would have made such an admission. As to the overt acts of France, all that the Chancellor said in his speech of December 2 was "that France's plan of campaign was known to us and that it compelled us for reasons of self-preservation to march through Belgium." But it is again significant that, speaking nearly five months after his first public utterance on the subject and with a full knowledge that the world had visited its destructive condemnation upon Germany for its wanton attack upon Belgium, _the Chancellor can still give no specific allegation of any overt act by France which justified the invasion_. All that is suggested is a supposed "plan of campaign."