following year, he, with his advisers, was, as we shall see from German testimony, to decide that it would be to Germany's advantage to force the issue. He had reached an understanding with the army, and up to this time the power of the Kaiser had been the only effective check on the plans of the militarists and Pan-Germans. The conflict they had long desired was now bound to come. We have no evidence to show that the Kaiser sympathized with or encouraged their dreams of annexations. It is difficult to believe, however, after the statements of his chancellors and the results of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk that he disapproved of them. What these designs were we know from President Wilson's statement:

"Their plan was to throw a broad belt of German military power and political control across the very centre of Europe and beyond the Mediterranean, into the heart of Asia; and Austria-Hungary was to be as much their tool and pawn as Serbia or Bulgaria or Turkey or the ponderous states of the East. AustriaHungary, indeed, was to become part of the Central German Empire, absorbed and dominated by the same forces and influences that had originally cemented the German States themselves. The dream had its heart at Ber

lin. It could have had a heart nowhere else. It rejected the idea of solidarity of race entirely. The choice of peoples played no part in it at all. It contemplated binding together racial and political units which could be kept together only by force-Czechs, Magyars, Croats, Serbs, Roumanians, Turks, Armenians-the proud states of Bohemia and Hungary, the stout little commonwealths of the Balkans, the indomitable Turks, the subtile peoples of the East. These peoples did not wish to be united. They ardently desired to direct their own affairs, would be satisfied only by the presence or the constant threat of armed men. They would live under a common power only by sheer compulsion and await the day of revolution. But the German military statesmen had reckoned with all that and were ready to deal with it in their own way.

Pan-Germans and militarists felt that the first step should and must be directed against France. How they intended to motivate such action is plain from the signed statement made for the Committee on Public Information by David Starr Jordan:

"In the summer of 1913 I learned of a meeting of the Friedensfreunde to be held in Nuremberg in July. I attended the meeting and be

* Address of June 14, 1917.

came acquainted with a number of leading Democrats, and with a good many others interested in peace, though not on a democratic basis. I was invited to come back to speak in the German cities, and I found time in December... to give lectures in Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, Mannheim, Stuttgart, and Munich. Through my friends I learned a good deal of the plans of the Pan Germanists and especially of the German General Staff.

"In brief, they hoped to bring on war in 1914. Presumably, at that time, through disturbances to be created in Alsace-Lorraine. They were then proposing to take Belgium and Holland-Holland for the sake of making Antwerp the center for the coming attack upon England. They wished especially to take the two departments of Nord and Pas-de-Calais from France. They proposed to make of Boulogne the great seaport of Germany, surrounding its broad, flat bay with breakwaters, doing all this before England would enter the war, and removing the German fleet to Boulogne. They had a new German name for Boulogne, but I do not find it in my notes and do not recollect it. They were also to take Paris and exact an indemnity that would pay the expenses of the war; 25,000,000 marks was the figure I heard mentioned. After this they were to treat France with great lenience, relieving her of all necessity for maintaining an army and navy and defending her from her great arch-enemy, Great Britain. It was thought

that France being wholly degenerate would not resist, and she could then devote herself to commerce and to the continuing of loans of money to finance German industry.

"I suppose that the Zabern incident and the arrest of Oncle Hansi' (Jean Jacques Waltz) were moves in the direction of inciting trouble in Alsace, getting a protest from France to be followed by a sudden ultimatum. The death of the Archduke (Francis Ferdinand, June 28, 1914), whether planned in Budapesth or not, served to make the way to war easier, by beginning it in the southeast."*

It is probable that William II, still smarting under the slight offered by the Socialists on May 20, 1914, and still chagrined over the outcome of the Morocco question and the Balkan Wars, was as anxious to show his power and re-establish his credit with all parties as he was to humiliate Serbia. It will be plain, moreover, that before Austria issued the ultimatum to Serbia he had decided to risk if not to provoke war with Russia and with France.

* Cf. "The Study of the Great War," by Samuel B. Harding, p. 27.

CHAPTER III

THE OCCASION OF THE WORLD WAR

N 1914 Europe was in a state of tension which

IN

had lasted six years, and which was beginning "to try the nerves" of the great Powers. More than anything else the movement in the Balkans was responsible for this general restlessness. The situation, especially in view of the increase of armaments in Germany, of which we have already spoken, and the French reply, by increasing the period of military service from two years to three, and the general aggressiveness of Berlin, made war seem imminent. The Balkan Peninsula had become the stormcentre, for, as we have seen, the developments there were threatening to overturn the unfortunate system of balance of power on which European politics had so long rested. Yet in the early stages of the present war we were inclined to pay too much attention to what was happening in the Balkans primarily, and