They did not originate, or desire, this hideous war, or wish
that we should be drawn into it, and we are vaguely conscious that we
are fighting their cause, as they will some day see it themselves, as
well as our own. They themselves are in the grip of the same sinister
power that has stretched its ugly talons out and drawn blood from us.
The War was begun by the military masters of Germany, who have proved
themselves to be also the masters of Austria-Hungary. These men never
regarded nations as peoples of men, women, and children of like blood
and frame as themselves, for whom Governments existed and in whom
Governments had their life. They regarded them merely as serviceable
organizations, which they could, either by force or intrigue, bend or
corrupt to their own purpose. They regarded the smaller States,
particularly, and those peoples, who could be overwhelmed by force, as
their natural tools and instruments of domination.
Their purpose had long been avowed. The statesmen of other nations, to
whom that purpose was incredible, paid little attention, and regarded
what the German professors expounded in their class-rooms and the German
writers set forth to the world as the goal of German policy as rather
the dream of minds detached from practical affairs and the preposterous
private conceptions of Germany's destiny than the actual plans of
responsible rulers.
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