The popular view of Germany, which most English people held during the war, was that for forty years the German nation from the Emperor downwards had pursued the definite and determined end of the destruction of England. The real situation appears to have been far more complex. To credit the Emperor and his entourage with an inflexibility of purpose so great is to rate their capacity far too high. The mediocre statesmen of our own generation were not Bismarcks. They were incapable of the far vision, the sinister purpose, the iron will of the old Chancellor. Unlike him they did not know when to stop. An influential section among the soldiers was certainly bent on a war of aggression and pursued this end with unfaltering determination. They had considerable influence both among the Press and the professors. Consequently they loomed large in the public eye. But even among the governing class, as Tirpitz’s angry complaints reveal, there were certain weak-kneed statesmen who were anxious to pursue a pacific policy. As for the German nation as a whole, the unparalleled growth of the Socialist party during recent years proves that the views of the German militarists were meeting with considerable opposition among sections of their own countrymen. The militarists largely controlled the machine and were therefore in the stronger position. An autocratic form of government and an Executive divorced from all control by Parliament made the Socialist vote, large though it was, of no practical value in determining policy. The General Election of 1912, when the Socialists and Progressives who had definitely challenged the Chauvinism of the Government secured considerable gains in the Reichstag, caused dismay in military circles. It is clear that the dread of democratic control was one of the causes which impelled the soldiers to bring matters to a head. A shadow had fallen on their power which a successful war, so they thought, would dispel. Had Germany possessed a democratic constitution which would have given due weight and place to the anti-military elements, it is difficult to believe that the war would ever have occurred. It was a race between the forces making respectively for peace and for aggression, and time was on the side of the former. The military party consequently forced the pace and precipitated the conflict. That on the outbreak of war the whole German nation, Socialists included, closed its ranks and presented a united front to the enemy is natural enough. The view of the defensive war was widespread, and German myopia could not see straight about the threatening character of the armaments which had been piled up. But between the guilt of the rulers, which is black indeed, and the guilt of the nation as a whole, wide discriminations should in justice be made. If it were not so the future outlook, dark as it is at the moment, would be quite hopeless.