Hence the plan of campaign--by unscrupulous strategy to seize the key of the castle, the stronghold of Dover; while, at the same time, the squadrons of the two Eagles menaced the coast of Ireland itself and landed troops at various points. It was an infamy; it was a dastardly and fratricidal act; it was a combination worthy of Herod and Pilate! All these things were said. But history is not made or unmade by the aid of epithets. History reckons with great national forces, race problems, and the bed-rock of accomplished facts. Abundant precedents could have been cited, and nothing succeeds likes success. In this case, if the attempt should fail, it might be explained away as the mad raid of a band of freebooters. Those who survived might be nominally called to account, just as had happened fifty years earlier after the futile raid of a certain Dr. Jameson, and others, when one Kruger was "King" of the Transvaal. In either event, whatever England might think and say of this stab in the back, there were millions in the States who would applaud the blow as smart beyond anything that had ever been attempted by American Presidents, and Hiram P. Dexter would go down to posterity as a Napoleon of enterprise--the man who realised that even America was not big enough in these mid-century days for the mixed peoples of the States; that the dominant race in that massed population needed more room to turn round in; more scope for hustling; fresh fields and pastures new for the feverish multiplication of the almighty dollar. But there was another nation to be reckoned with. The two greatest competitors for world-power and commerce were Germany and America. And Germany and America did not want to fight--at present. A system of mutual concessions--with mental reservations--better suited the provisional purposes of Berlin and Washington, at any rate for the time being. Clearly, nothing could be done by way of aggression in Europe without taking Germany into account. So the business-like President of the States had engineered with the Germans what brokers and auctioneers describe as a big "knock-out." They had come to an understanding--about England--an understanding provisional and tentative.