Americans, however, come reluctantly to the task of this examination, for two reasons. First, we are all tired of the war, we hate to think of it or of anything connected with it, and as far as possible, we keep it out of our minds. Second, nearly every reputation of any consequence in this country, political, clerical, academic and journalistic, is already committed, head over ears, to the validity of this theory. How many of our politicians are there whose reputations are not bound up inextricably with this legend of a German plot? How many of our newspaper-editors managed to preserve detachment enough under the pressure of war-propaganda to be able to come forward to-day and say that the question of responsibility for the war should be re-opened? How can the pro-war liberals and ex-pacifists ask for such an inquest when they were all swept off their feet by the specious plea that _this_ war was a different war from all other wars in the history of mankind? What can our ministers of religion say after the unreserved endorsement that they put upon the sanctity of the Allied cause? What can our educators say, after having served so zealously the ends of the official propagandists? From our journalists and men of letters what can we expect--after all his rodomontade about Potsdam and the Potsdam gang, how could we expect Dr. Henry Van Dyke, for instance, to face the fact that the portentous Potsdam meeting of the Crown Council on 5 July, 1914, _never took place at all_? There is no use in trying to put a breaking-strain upon human nature, or, on the other hand, in assuming a pharisaic attitude towards its simplest and commonest frailties. It is best, under the circumstances, merely to understand that on this question every institutional voice in the United States is tongue-tied. Press, pulpit, schools and universities, charities and foundations, forums, all are silent; and to expect them to break their silence is to expect more than should be expected from the pride of opinion in average human nature. II In examining the evidence let us first take Mr. Lloyd George's own statement of the theory. Except in one particular, it presents the case against Germany quite as it has been rehearsed by nearly every institutional voice in the United States. On 4 August, 1917--after America's entry into the war--the British Premier said: What are we fighting for? To defeat the most dangerous conspiracy ever plotted against the liberty of nations; carefully, skilfully, insidiously, clandestinely planned in every detail, with ruthless, cynical determination.