ntous combat. These
documents seem to Americans to contain a large amount of misinformation
about the attack of Austria-Hungary on Servia, the diplomatic
negotiations and the correspondence between the sovereigns which
immediately preceded the war, and the state of mind of the Belgian and
English peoples. American believers in the good sense and good feeling
of the common people naturally imagine, when an awful calamity befalls a
nation, that the people cannot have been warned of its approach, else
they would have avoided it. In this case they fear that the Emperor, the
Chancellery, and the General Staff have themselves been misinformed in
important respects, have made serious miscalculations which they are
proposing to conceal as long as possible, and are not taking the common
people into their confidence. American sympathies are with the German
people in their sufferings and losses, but not with their rulers, or
with the military class, or with the professors and men of letters who
have been teaching for more than a generation that might makes right.
That short phrase contains the fundamental fallacy which for fifty years
has been poisoning the springs of German thought and German policy on
public affairs.

Dread of the Muscovite does not seem to Americans a reasonable
explanation of the present actions of Germany and Austria-Hungary,
except so far as irrational panic can be said to be an explanation.
Against possible, though not probable, Russian aggression, a firm
defensive alliance of all Western Europe would be a much better
protection than the single might of Germany. It were easy to imagine
also two new "buffer" States--a reconstructed Poland and a Balkan
Confederation. As to French "revenge," it is the inevitable and
praiseworthy consequence of Germany's treatment of France in 1870-71.
The great success of Germany in expanding her commerce during the last
thirty years makes it hard for Americans to understand the hot
indignation of the Germans against the British because of whatever
ineffective opposition Great Britain may have offered to that expansion.
No amount of commercial selfishness on the part of insular England can
justify Germany in attempting to seize supreme power in Europe and
thence, perhaps, in the world.

Finally, Americans hope and expect that there will be no such fatal
issue of the present struggle as the destruction or ruin of the German
Nation. On the contrary, they believe that Germany w