The pamphlets by German publicists and men of letters which are now coming to this country, and the various similar publications written here, seem to indicate that the German public is still kept by its Government in ignorance about the real antecedents of the war and about many of the incidents and aspects of the portentous combat. These documents seem to Americans to contain a large amount of misinformation about the attack of Austria-Hungary on Servia, the diplomatic negotiations and the correspondence between the sovereigns which immediately preceded the war, and the state of mind of the Belgian and English peoples. American believers in the good sense and good feeling of the common people naturally imagine, when an awful calamity befalls a nation, that the people cannot have been warned of its approach, else they would have avoided it. In this case they fear that the Emperor, the Chancellery, and the General Staff have themselves been misinformed in important respects, have made serious miscalculations which they are proposing to conceal as long as possible, and are not taking the common people into their confidence. American sympathies are with the German people in their sufferings and losses, but not with their rulers, or with the military class, or with the professors and men of letters who have been teaching for more than a generation that might makes right. That short phrase contains the fundamental fallacy which for fifty years has been poisoning the springs of German thought and German policy on public affairs. Dread of the Muscovite does not seem to Americans a reasonable explanation of the present actions of Germany and Austria-Hungary, except so far as irrational panic can be said to be an explanation. Against possible, though not probable, Russian aggression, a firm defensive alliance of all Western Europe would be a much better protection than the single might of Germany. It were easy to imagine also two new "buffer" States--a reconstructed Poland and a Balkan Confederation. As to French "revenge," it is the inevitable and praiseworthy consequence of Germany's treatment of France in 1870-71. The great success of Germany in expanding her commerce during the last thirty years makes it hard for Americans to understand the hot indignation of the Germans against the British because of whatever ineffective opposition Great Britain may have offered to that expansion. No amount of commercial selfishness on the part of insular England can justify Germany in attempting to seize supreme power in Europe and thence, perhaps, in the world.