Of all the people whom the annihilation lie was intended to influence—and did influence—by far the most important was the Emperor William himself. Englishmen must always remember that he is the son of an English mother, and that at heart he is a pacifist and a Christian, even though the God in whom he quite sincerely believes is the God of the Old Testament. But he is also a hegemonist. He constantly sees (or saw) himself and his country and his army playing the big _rôle_ on the world’s stage, and the cunning and unscrupulous advisers by whom he is surrounded took advantage of that weakness in his nature to make him believe that Germany’s salvation could only be secured by Germany’s domination of Europe. Themselves they never made any secret of their determination to bring about the war, nor of their object in doing so. Wretched creatures like Bernhardi and Tannenberg frankly proclaimed that they were out for plunder—the plunder of the world; that they could only secure it by crushing the rest of Europe in a world’s war; and that in order to bring about and win that war Germany would deliberately refuse to fetter her actions by the universally accepted canons of right and wrong. The whole scheme was so monstrous that in spite of the nakedness of these threats—and God knows they were numerous enough—very few Englishmen or Frenchmen could bring themselves to believe that they were made in earnest, and the result was that, sheltered behind the prevailing feeling of incredulity excited in other countries by the utterances of the Pan-Germanist extremists, the rest of the war-party were able to go on quietly with their preparations for war without calling into being any corresponding activity on our part. And then, when at last the moment for which they had all been waiting had arrived—as soon, that is to say, as the men appointed for the task had convinced the Kaiser that Germany was in mortal danger—the war was declared. After that only one more step was necessary to complete his downfall. Being a man of humane instincts and not a degraded savage like some of his advisers, he had to be persuaded—and he has allowed himself to be persuaded—that the surest means of shortening the war, and therefore of curtailing as far as was possible its inevitable horrors, was to make it more horrible still by instituting the Hunnish system of terrorism—of which the examples given in this book can convey only the very feeblest impression.