Having laid bare the fallacy of the German argument, let us now, for the benefit of honest neutrals, attempt to give a general view of the true causes of the war, and to indicate their sequence. Let us distinguish between the deep-seated and the immediate causes of the struggle. The war can be traced to a single deep and remote cause, namely, the will of William II. to achieve the Pangerman plan; all secondary causes, that is to say, the economic ones, spring from it. One aim of the Pangerman plan was actually to put an end to the enormous difficulties which Germany had created for herself by the hypertrophy of her industries, and by thus upsetting the proper balance which had formerly existed between her agricultural and her industrial productions. The truth of this deep-seated and unique cause of the war is demonstrated by: 1º. The intellectual preparation, in all domains, of the Pangerman plan for twenty-five years. 2º. Such explicit and ancient avowals as the following. In 1898 Rear-Admiral von Goetzen, an intimate friend of the Kaiser, being at Manilla, said to the American, Admiral Dewey, who had just destroyed the Spanish fleet before Manilla: “You will not believe me, but in about fifteen years my country will begin war. At the end of two months we shall hold Paris; but that will only form one step towards our real goal—the overthrow of England. Every event will happen exactly at its proper time, for we shall be ready and our enemies will not” (quoted by the _Echo de Paris_, 24th September, 1915, from the _Naval and Military Record_). 3º. The material facts of world-wide preparation, obviously for war, made several months previous to its outbreak, but not till the Kaiser had decided to start it, that is, towards November, 1913. (Proofs: declaration of William II. on 6th November, 1913, to King Albert of Belgium; interview of the Kaiser with the Arch-Duke Ferdinand, April, 1914, at Miramar, and in June, 1914, at Konopischt, where Admiral Tirpitz accompanied the Kaiser.) These material facts are endless, but it will suffice to recall the following as truly significant, because they have required a long and complicated effort: first, the organization for the victualling of the piratical German cruisers on all the seas of the globe, in view of a long war of piracy; and second, the preparation of the revolt against England in South Africa. The immediate causes which decided William II. to precipitate the war are: 1º. The defeat of Turkey in 1912 by Italy and the Balkan peoples—a defeat which, by threatening Berlin influence in Constantinople, endangered the hold which Germany already had on the Ottoman Empire. 2º. The consequences of the Bukarest treaty, which in 1913 had erected automatically a formidable barrier against the Pangerman pretensions in the Balkans.