illustration of what to avoid, but also because she affords so clear an
example of what is going on elsewhere in Europe--in England and France
and Italy, and among all the modern nations. We cannot blame Germany
without implicitly also blaming these.

What, indeed, shall we say of England? Germany has for years maintained
that with her own growing population and her growing trade she needs a
more extended seaboard in Europe, and coaling stations and colonies in
other regions of the globe, but that England, jealous of commercial
supremacy, has been determined to deny her these, and, if possible, to
crush her; that she (Germany) has lived in perpetual fear and panic;
and that if in this case she has been the first to strike, it has only
been because to wait England's opportunity would have been to court
defeat. Allowing for the exaggerations inseparable from opposed points
of view, is there not some justification for this plea? England, who
plunged into the Crimean War in order to _prevent_ Russia from obtaining
a seaboard and her natural commercial expansion, and who afterwards
joined with Russia in order to plunder Persia and to prevent Germany
from getting her railways along the Persian Gulf; who calmly
appropriated Egypt, with its valuable cottonlands and market; who, at
the behest of a group of capitalists and financiers, turned her great
military machine on a little nation of Boer farmers in South Africa;
who, it is said,[9] sold 300,000 tons of coal to Russia to aid her fleet
against Japan, and at the same time furnished Japan with gold at a high
rate of interest for use against Russia--what trust can be placed in
her? "England," says Bernhardi, "in spite of all her pretences of a
liberal and philanthropic policy, has never sought any other object
than personal advantage and the unscrupulous suppression of her rivals."
Let us hope that this "never" is _too_ harsh; let us at least say
"hardly ever"; but still, are we not compelled to admit that if the rise