These publications have been read with intense interest by impartial
observers in all parts of the world, and have in many cases determined
the direction of the readers' sympathy and good will; and yet none of
them discloses or deals with the real sources of the unprecedented
calamity. They relate chiefly to the question who struck the match, and
not to the questions who provided the magazine that exploded, and why
did he provide it. Grave responsibility, of course, attaches to the
person who gives the order to mobilize a national army or to invade a
neighbor's territory; but the real source of the resulting horrors is
not in such an order, but in the Governmental institutions, political
philosophy, and long-nurtured passions and purposes of the nation or
nations concerned.
German Desire for World Empire.
The prime source of the present immense disaster in Europe is the desire
on the part of Germany for world empire, a desire which one European
nation after another has made its supreme motive, and none that has once
adopted it has ever completely eradicated. Germany arrived late at this
desire, being prevented until 1870 from indulging it, because of her
lack of unity, or rather because of being divided since the Thirty
Years' War into a large number of separate, more or less independent,
States.
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