ve better
still.

"However, we can place no limit upon the probable expansion of human
desires, and it is true that a population unchecked by the intelligent
action of the human will tends to increase at a rate more rapid than
that at which it is possible to raise the actual plane of human living.

"The speed of the working of the two rules is different, perhaps, but
both are dynamic, and the population of Germany tended to grow more
rapidly than betterment of conditions could be provided, even under the
nation's splendid governmental and commercial efficiency.

"The natural yearning of the nation, therefore, was toward colonial
expansion, and, although note that I make no charges against either the
German Government or German people, the nation probably has wished
sovereignty over Western Europe, through Belgium and Holland to the sea.
Its narrow outlet through Hamburg and Bremen was insufficient for its
needs.

"Of course, its trade and economic advance has sometimes conflicted
with that of other nations. It is natural for Germany to suppose that
England tried to block it. However, I think that all the evidence which
Germany has brought forward in proof of this is weak and improbable,
because England's great source of revenue has been her foreign trade,
and, above all, her carrying trade, and I am not partisan but stating
the obvious when I say that England prospers when the rest of the world
prospers, and that she has profited mightily through Germany's
commercial advance.

"These facts point to the conclusion that Germany really had everything
to gain by avoiding war and continuing her prosperous expansion along
commercial lines, increasing the strength of her grip in foreign
countries, as, for example, in South America."

Germany's Prosperous Commerce.

"In South America we Americans were not really competing with her. She
had studied the market and adopted the methods necessary to its
satisfaction; we had not. England was relatively losing her hold there.
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 Con