In another twenty years Germany surely would have been one of the
greatest commercial and manufacturing nations which the world has ever
known. So it was not economic necessity, nor pressure approaching
economic necessity, which precipitated this war.
"I think the German people, as they professed to do, did become greatly
alarmed over a possibility, magnified into a probability, that Russia,
taking up the cause of the Balkan peoples, would obtain Constantinople,
that Servia would make her way to the Adriatic, and that all possibility
of the expansion of Germany to the southeast would be blocked, and
Germany probably became alarmed over England's intentions--there were
many indications of something close to panic in Germany after it was
generally understood that King Edward figured in the pact with France.
"I, for one, do not believe that the German fears of England were well
grounded; I do not believe that in the excitement the German mind worked
discriminatingly or that it is working with discrimination today. I
think that Germany has presented an extraordinary example of nation-wide
mobmindedness in a situation which offered nothing but ruin through war
and boundless advantages if she sat tight and waited for some one else
to strike the first blow, which, then, probably never would have been
struck.
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