hoking day on the
journey between Jaffa and Jerusalem.

These were only the straws that told how the wind blew, but they were
disquieting symptoms nevertheless to such of us as felt, with Professor
Harnack and his colleagues at the Edinburgh Conference, that by blood,
history, and faith the German and British peoples were brothers (ugly
as it sounds to say so now), each more closely bound to the other in the
world-task of civilization than with almost any other nation.

"If we are brothers we'll fight all the more fiercely for that fact," we
thought, "and, God help us, we'll fight soon."

"HE KNOWS, DOESN'T HE?"

I was staying in a neutral country at an hotel much frequented by the
German governing classes when an English newspaper proprietor, after
a visit to Berlin, published in his most popular journal a map of a
portion of Northern Europe in order to show at sight his view of the
extent of the forthcoming German aggression. The paper was lying open
between a group of gentlemen whose names have since become prominent
in relation to the war when I stepped up to the table. The men were
obviously angry, although laughing immoderately. "Look at that," said
one of them, pointing to the map and running his finger down the coast
of Holland and Belgium and France to Calais. "_He_ knows, doesn't he?"

And then, after a general burst of derisive laughter, came a bitter
attack on British journalism ("The scaremongering of that paper is
doing more than anything in the world to make war between Germany and
England"), a still fiercer and more bitter assault on our Lords of the
Admiralty, who had lately proposed a year's truce in the building of
battleships ("Tell your Mr. Churchill to mind his own business, and
we'll mind ours"), and, finally, a passionate protest that Germany's
object in increasing her navy was not to enlarge her empire, but
merely to keep the seas open to her trade. "Why," said one of the men,
"nine-tenths of my own business is with London, and if England could
shut up our ships I should be a ruined man in a month." "Quite so," said
another, "and so far as German people go that's the beginning and end of
the whole matter."

WE BELIEVED IT

We believed it. I am compelled to count myself among the number of my
countrymen who through many years believed that story--that the accident
of Germany's disadvantageous geographical position, not her desire to
break British supremacy on the sea, made it