r own. Certainly, whatever other or side views we may take
of the war, we are bound to see in it an illustration of the danger of
military class-rule. You cannot keep a 60-h.p. Daimler motor-car in your
shed for years and years and still deny yourself the pleasure of going
out on the public road with it--even though you know you are not a very
competent driver; and you cannot continue for half a century perfecting
your military and naval organization without in the end making the
temptation to become a political road-hog almost irresistible.

Still, accepting for the moment the popular explanation given above of
Germany's action as to some degree justified, we cannot help seeing how
superficial and unsatisfactory it is, because it at once raises the
question, which, indeed, is being asked in all directions, and not
satisfactorily answered: "How does it happen that so peace-loving,
sociable, and friendly a people as the great German mass-folk, as we
have hitherto known them, with their long scientific and literary
tradition, their love of music and philosophy, their lager beer and
tobacco, and their generally democratic habits, should have been led
into a situation like the present, whether by a clique of Junkers or by
a clique of militarist philosophers and politicians?" And the answer to
this is both interesting and important.

It resolves itself into two main causes: (1) the rise of the great
German commercial class; and (2) the political ignorance of the German
people.

It is obvious, I think, that a military aristocracy alone, or even with
the combined support of empire-building philosophers and a jack-boot
Kaiser, could not have hurried the solid German nation into so strange a
situation. In old days, and under an avowedly feudal order of society,
such a thing might well have happened. But to-day the source and seat of
power has passed from crowned heads and barons into another social
stratum. It is the financial and commercial classes in the modern States
who have the sway; and unless these classes desire it the military
cliques may plot for war in vain. Since 1870, and the unification of
Germany, the growth of her manufactures and her trade has been enormous;
her commercial prosperity has gone up by leaps and bounds; and this
extension of trade, especially of international trade, has led--as it
had already so conspicuously done in England--to the development of
corresponding ideals and habits of life among the