When the war first broke out no one could give an adequate reason for
it. It all seemed absurd, monstrous, impossible. Then arose a Babel of
explanations. It was that Germany desired to crush France finally; it
was that she was determined to break Great Britain's naval and
commercial supremacy; it was that she must have an outlet on the sea
through Belgium and Holland; that she must force a way to the
Mediterranean through Servia; that she must carry out her financial
schemes in Asia Minor and the Baghdad region. It was her hatred of the
Slav and her growing dread of Russia; it was her desire for a Colonial
Empire; it was fear of a revolution at home; it was the outcome of long
years of Pan-Germanist philosophy; it was the result of pure military
ambition and the class-domination of the Junkers. Each and all of these
reasons (and many others) were in turn cited, and magnified into the
mainspring of the war; and yet even to-day we cannot say which _was_ the
main reason, or if we admit them all we cannot say in what exact
proportions their influences were combined.

Moreover, they all assume that Germany was the aggressor; and we have to
remember that this would not be admitted for a moment by a vast number
of the Germans themselves--who cease not to say that the war was simply
forced upon them by the hostile preparations of Russia, by the
vengefulness of France, by the jealous foreign policy of England, and by
the obvious threat embodied in the _Entente_ between those three
nations; and that if they (the Germans) made preparations for, or even
precipitated it, that was only out of the sheer necessity of
self-preservation.[3]

Thus we are still left without any generally accepted conclusion in the
matter. Moreover, we are struck, in considering the list of reasons
cited, by a feeling that they are all in their way rather partial and