the plains of Poland, in the prairies of Hungary, on the plateaux of
Africa, and especially around the railway line to Baghdad--in the rich
valleys of Asia Minor, which can provide German capitalists with a
labouring population ready to be exploited under one of the most
beautiful skies in the world. It may be so with Egypt some day.
Therefore it is ports for exports, and especially military ports, in the
Adriatic, the Persian Gulf, on the African coast in Beira, and also in
the Pacific, that these schemers of German colonial trade wish to
conquer. Their faithful servant, the German Empire, with its armies and
ironclads, is at their service for this purpose."

It is this class, then, which by backing both financially and morally
the military class has been chiefly responsible for bringing about the
war. Not that I mean, in saying so, that the commercial folk of Germany
have directly instigated its outbreak at the present moment and in the
present circumstances--for many, or most of them, must have seen how
dangerous it was likely to prove to their trade. But in respect of the
general policy which they have so long pursued they are responsible. One
cannot go on for years (and let England, too, remember this) preaching
militarism as a means of securing commercial advantage, and then refuse
to be answerable for the results to which such a policy may lead. The
Junker classes of Prussia and their Kaiser might be suffering from a bad
attack of swelled head; vanity and arrogance might be filling them with
dreams of world-empire; but there would have been no immediate European
war had not the vast trade-interests of Germany come into conflict, or
seemed to come into conflict, with the trade-interests of the
surrounding nations--had not the financial greed of the nation been
stirred, as well as its military vanity.

And talking of general trade and finance, one must not forget to include