In these towns, according to the requirement of my studies, I passed days, weeks, or months, often on repeated occasions. I endeavoured, so far as the opportunities and the time admitted of it, to enter into direct relations with the acting ministers, the leaders of the various political parties, the diplomatists and the consuls, both French and foreign, some heads of states, influential journalists, officers of repute, military and naval attachés, well-informed merchants and manufacturers. It was thus that, by means of information of many sorts drawn from the most diverse sources, and checked by comparison with each other, I have attempted to set forth the Pangerman political and military plan. Since 1898 I have endeavoured to draw the attention of the public to the immense danger which that plan was laying up for the world, as my former works testify, particularly _L’Europe et la Question d’Autriche au seuil du XXe Siècle_, which appeared in 1901, therefore fifteen years ago, and contained an exposition, as precise as it was then possible to make it, of the Pangerman plan of 1895, summed up in the formula “Hamburg to the Persian Gulf”; also _Le Chemin de fer de Bagdad_, published in 1903, wherein I set forth the danger of that co-operation between Germany and Turkey, which was then only nascent, but which we see full-fledged to-day. I attempted also by numerous lectures to diffuse among the public some notion of the Pangerman peril. I did not content myself with warning my countrymen. I am proud to have been one of the first Frenchmen to preach a cordial understanding between France and England at a time when there was perhaps some merit in doing so. I deemed it, therefore, a duty to inform the British public, so far as it lay in my power, that the Pangerman peril concerned Great Britain quite as much as France. In 1909 the Franco-Scottish Society kindly invited me to lecture to its members at Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. I seized the opportunity, and took for the subject of my lectures, “The problem of Central Europe and universal politics.” _The Aberdeen Free Press_, of May 8th, 1909, summed up very exactly as follows the substance of what I said, seven years ago, to my British hearers: