Let us see. Our danger came from Germany's aggressiveness. What made her more aggressive than other nations, than those who later became our Allies--Russia, Rumania, Italy, Japan, France? Sheer original sin, apart from political or economic circumstance? Now it was an extraordinary thing that those who were most clamant about the danger were for the most part quite ready to admit--even to urge and emphasise as part of their case--that Germany's aggression was _not_ due to inherent wickedness, but that any nation placed in her position would behave in just about the same way. That, indeed, was the view of very many pre-eminent before the War in their warnings of the German peril, of among others, Lord Roberts, Admiral Mahan, Mr Frederic Harrison, Mr Blatchford, Professor Wilkinson. Let us recall, for instance, Mr Harrison's case for German aggression--Germany's 'poor access to the sea and its expanding population':-- 'A mighty nation of 65,000,000, with such superb resources both for peace and war, and such overweening pride in its own superiority and might, finds itself closed up in a ring-fence too narrow for its fecundity as for its pretensions, constructed more by history, geography, and circumstances than by design--a fence maintained by the fears rather than the hostility of its weaker neighbours. That is the rumbling subterranean volcano on which the European State system rests. 'It is inevitable but that a nation with the magnificent resources of the German, hemmed in a territory so inadequate to their needs and pretensions, and dominated by a soldier, bureaucratic, and literary caste, all deeply imbued with the Bismarckian doctrine, should thirst to extend their dominions, and their power at any sacrifice--of life, of wealth, and of justice. One must take facts as they are, and it is idle to be blind to facts, or to rail against them. It is as silly to gloss over manifest perils as it is to preach moralities about them.... England, Europe, civilisation, is in imminent peril from German expansion.'[136] Very well. We are to drop preaching moralities and look at the facts. Would successful war by us remove the economic and political causes which were part at least of the explanation of German aggression? Would her need for expansion become less? The preceding pages answer that question. Successful war by us would not dispose of the pressure of German population. If the German menace was due in part at least to such causes as 'poor access to the sea,' the absence of any assurance as to future provision for an expanding population, what measures were proposed for the removal of those causes?