of all human
things the supremacy of the German power and the German spirit, and all
that time biding her opportunity. Gentlemen, many of the great wars of
history have been almost accidentally brought about by the blindness of
blundering statesmen, or by some wave of popular passion. That is not so
today. ["Hear, hear!"] There was nothing in a quarrel such as this
between Austria and Servia that could not have been and that would not
have been settled by pacific means. [Cheers.]

Germany's Profound Mistakes.

But in the judgment of those who guide and control German policy the
hour had come to strike the blow that had been long and deliberately
prepared. In their hands lay the choice between peace and war, and their
election was for war. In so deciding, as everybody now knows, Germany
made two profound miscalculations. [Cheers.] Both of them natural enough
in a man who had come to believe that in international matters
everything can be explained and measured in terms of material force.
What, gentlemen, were those mistakes? The first was that Belgium,
[cheers,] a small and prosperous country entirely disinterested in
European quarrels, guaranteed by the joint and several compacts of the
great powers, that Belgium would not resent, and certainly would not
resist, the use of her territory as a highroad for an invading German
force into France. How could they imagine that this little country,
rather than allow her neutrality to be violated and her independence
insulted and menaced, was prepared that her fields should be drenched
with the blood of her soldiers, her towns and villages devastated by
marauders, her splendid heritage of monuments and of treasures, built up
for her by the piety, art, and learning of the past, ruthlessly laid in
ruins? The passionate attachment of a numerically small population to
the bit of territory, which looks so little upon the map, the pride and
the unconquerable devotion of a free people to their own free State,
these were things which apparently had never been dreamed of in the
philosophy of Potsdam. [Laughter and "Hear, hear!"] Rarely in history
has there been a greater material disparity between the invaders and the
invaded, but the moral disparity was at least equally great. [Cheers.]
For, gentlemen, the indomitable resistance of the Belgians did more than
change the whole face of the campaign. [Cheers.] It proved to the world
that ideas which cannot be weighed or measured by any mat