crossed the Belgian frontier and hostilities began, the Imperial Chancellor at the great session of the Reichstag on August 4th declared, to use his own words:

Thank God, their military aims have not yet been attained, and from present appearances are not likely to be, but, as Mr. Beck believes, Germany will still be held by the judgment of mankind to make good the damage done.

In reviewing the diplomatic correspondence published by Germany that preceded the outbreak of the war, Mr. Beck lays great stress, and we think justly, upon the obvious suppression of evidence by Germany, in omitting substantially all the important correspondence on vital points that passed between Germany and Austria, and the suppression of important evidence in judicial proceedings always carries irresistible weight against the party guilty of it. While England and France and Russia were pressing Germany to influence and control Austria in the interests of peace, not a word is disclosed of what, if anything, the German Foreign Office said to Austria toward that end. To quote Mr. Beck’s own words:

Notwithstanding the disavowal given by the German Ambassador at Petrograd to the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, that the German Government had no knowledge of the text of the Austrian note before it was handed in, and did not exercise any influence on its contents, Mr. Beck establishes clearly by the admissions of the German Foreign Office itself that it was consulted by Austria previous to the ultimatum, and that it not only approved of its course, but literally gave to Austria carte blanche to proceed. And the German Ambassador to the United States formally admitted in an article in The Independent of September 7, 1914, that “Germany had approved in advance the Austrian ultimatum to Servia.”

This brutal ultimatum by a great nation of fifty millions of people, making impossible demands against a little one of four millions which had itself just emerged from two conflicts and was still suffering from exhaustion—an ultimatum which set all the nations of Europe in agitation—is proved to have been jointly concocted by the two members of the Triple Alliance, Germany and Austria. But the third member of that Alliance, Italy, found it to be an act of aggression on their part which brought on the war, and that the terms of the Triple Alliance, therefore, did not bind her to take any part.

The peace parleys which passed between the several nations involved are carefully reviewed by Mr. Beck, who concludes, as we think justly, that up to the 28th of July, when the German Imperial Chancellor sent for the English Ambassador and announced the refusal of his Government to accept the conference of the Powers proposed by Sir Edward Grey, every proposal to preserve peace had come from the Triple Entente, and that every such proposal had met with an uncompromising negative from Austria, and either that or obstructive quibbles from Germany.

At this point, the sudden return of the Kaiser to Berlin from his annual holiday in Norway, which his own Foreign Office regretted as a step taken on his Majesty’s own initiative and which they feared might cause speculation and excitement, and his personal intervention from that time until his troops invaded Luxemburg and he made his abrupt demand upon the Belgian Government for permission to cross its territory are reviewed with great force and effect by Mr. Beck, with the conclusion on his part that the Kaiser, who by a timely word to Austria might have prevented all the terrible trouble that followed, was the supremely guilty party, and that such will be the verdict of history.

Mr. Beck’s review of the case of Belgium is extremely interesting, and his conclusion that England, France, Russia, and Belgium can await with confidence the world’s final verdict that their quarrel was just, rests safely upon the plea of “Guilty” by Germany, a conclusion which seems to have been already plainly declared by most of the civilized nations of the world.

We think that Mr. Beck’s opinion that England and France were taken unawares and were wholly unprepared for war is a little too strongly expressed. France, certainly, had been making ready for war with Germany ever since the great conflict of 1870 had resulted in her loss of Alsace and Lorraine, and had had a fixed and unalterable determination to get them back when she could, although it is evident that she did not expect her opportunity to come just when and as it did. That Great Britain had no present expectation of immediate war with Germany is clearly obvious. That she had long been apprehending the danger of it in the indefinite future is very clear, but that Sir Edward Grey and the Government and the people that he represented did all that they possibly could to prevent the war seems to be clearly established.

Mr. Beck’s book is so extremely interesting from beginning to end that it is difficult when once begun to lay it down and break off the reading, and we shall not be surprised to hear, not only that it has had an immense sale in England and America, but that its translation into the languages of the other nations of Europe has been demanded.

Joseph H. Choate.

New York, January 10, 1915.

[Pg xiv-xv]

FOREWORD

On the eve of the Great War I sat one evening in the reading room of the Hotel Erbprinz in classic Weimar. I had spent ten happy days in Thuringia, and had visited with deep interest a little village near Erfurt, where one of my forbears was born. I had seen Jena, from whose historic university this paternal ancestor had gone as a missionary to North America in the middle of the eighteenth century. This simple-minded German pietist had cherished the apparent delusion that even the uncivilized Indians of the American wilderness might be taught—the Bernhardis and Treitschkes to the contrary notwithstanding—that to increase the political power of a nation by the deliberate and highly systematized destruction of its neighbors was not the truest political ideal, even of an Indian tribe.

This missionary had gone most fittingly to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where its enlightened founder had already given a demonstration of the truth that a treaty of peace, even though not formally expressed in a “scrap of paper,” might be kept by white men and so-called savages