"For months past we have been living, and we are living now, in an atmosphere of passion such as we have perhaps never before experienced in Germany. At the root of this feeling is the determination of Germany to make its strength and capability prevail in the world." It was in these words that the Imperial Chancellor on November 10th, and again with added emphasis on December 5th, diag nosed the present temper of the German people; and it is because we are believed to have set ourselves against this determination, and to have threatened war rather than see "Germany's strength and capability prevail in the world," that the German people are banded in a universal league of animosity and resentment against us. The impression made by our recent diplomacy has left us, it is hardly too much to say, without a single friend in the Empire. Profoundly as the masses of Englishmen were shocked to discover that without knowing it they had been all but on the verge of war with Germany, Germans were still more shocked by the revelation that in a matter of secondary concern, one that touched none of our vital interests, we were ready, we even seemed to them anxious, to force a conflict. They feel as Russia felt when the Kaiser three years ago stepped to the side of his Austrian ally "in shining armor." Nothing will ever persuade them that but for our intervention they could not have made better terms with France. They regard themselves as worsted and humiliated in a diplomatic encounter in which we, and we alone, tipped the scales against them. They observe that British interests in Morocco remained to all appearances unaffected and British susceptibilities unroused by the French occupation of Fez and by the

operations of Spain in the northern regions, and that it was only when a German gunboat was dispatched to Agadir that the British Government began to talk of a "new situation." They note that while a Franco-Spanish partition of Morocco was condoned by Downing Street the possibility of Germany sharing in the spoils was looked upon as a menace to be resisted by war. They point out that the rupture of the Act of Algeciras was acquiesced in by Great Britain until it seemed likely to work out to Germany's advantage, and that the principle of compensation encountered no opposition until the Wilhelmstrasse put in its claim for consideration. They find, in short, that throughout the Morocco crisis of 1911 we played our customary rôle, throwing open the path of expansion to other nations but blocking it to Germany, and going out of our way to impede her legitimate development. Smooth protestations that "we do not desire to stand in the light of any Power which wants to find its place in the sun" count for little in the face of the facts that all our diplomatic compacts and agreements of the past ten years have one feature in common--Germany is excluded from them; that in 1904 we attempted to settle the fate of Morocco without consulting Germany, and as though Germany had no interest whatever in the Shereefian Empire; that in 1907 we disposed of Persia in similar fashion; that every sign of the lukewarmness of Italy in supporting her allies of the Triplice is hailed by the British Press with unconcealed gratification; and that wherever Germany turns she finds Great Britain comfortably established across her path.

Against this accumulating evidence of ill-will catalogues of the agreements we concluded with Germany in

other and happier days avail nothing. Indeed, if one were to survey from a German standpoint the past seventy or eighty years of Anglo-German relations, the legend of British friendliness would be, if not dissipated, at least severely discounted. Great Britain was Danish throughout the Schleswig-Holstein crisis, was decidedly proAustrian during the struggle of 1866, and from the Franco-Prussian war emerged with nothing but the cordial animosity of both sides. She never showed herself sympathetic to the movement for German unity. She never welcomed or aided the disappearance of a weakly, divided Germany and the rise of a powerful Empire in its place. She treated the latter alternately as an interesting prodigy to be lectured and patronized and as a commercial and political rival to be feared and thwarted; and while a philo-German tradition undoubtedly obtained in Downing Street up to the moment of the Kaiser's telegram to President Krüger, it never had its roots in any real instinct of friendliness and appreciation but was mainly the by-product of Anglo-French and Anglo-Russian antagonisms. The chief difference, according to the Germans, between Anglo-German relations as they were from, say, 1848 to 1895, and as they have been during the past sixteen years, is that in the latter epoch tendencies have hardened into prepossessions and a latent ill-will has developed into an open and deliberate policy of hostility. And that policy has never been made so manifest or pursued with so little disguise as in the recent negotiations over Morocco. Rightly or wrongly, all Germans believe that as the result of the British attitude and preparations their Government was forced to content itself with very much less than it had reasonably hoped to gain. The consequence is a feeling of bitter and universal anger that could

hardly be intensified if the two nations were actually at war.

I am not, of course, subscribing to the German point of view, but merely trying to elucidate it. Many counterbalancing considerations would have to be weighed before it could be accepted either as a fair statement of AngloGerman relations in general or of the Morocco episode in particular. If Great Britain in the old days showed a certain backwardness in giving the Germans their due, in treating them as a matured and responsible Power, and in acknowledging that they had grown out of British tutelage, the Germans on their side displayed an almost morbid anxiety to have their new-won strength and importance recognized, and when no recognition was voluntarily forthcoming would often attempt to force it by a rather puerile and clamorous assertiveness. If the British seemed to the Germans needlessly "superior" and condescending, the Germans seemed to the British quite gratuitously "touchy." If our diplomacy of late years in its dealings with the Wilhelmstrasse has worn the aspect of a somewhat mechanical and unimaginative obstructiveness, their diplomacy has equally disconcerted Downing Street by its unnecessary brusqueness. There have, in fact, been faults of manner innumerable on both sides. The defects in the national character of both peoples contributed their inevitable share to the growing acrimony, and the estrangement necessarily deepened, on the German side at least, when the colonial fever began to influence German foreign policy and it was found that so far as all hope of a Greater Germany that would spread the German idea and receive German colonists and extend German trade was concerned, the Empire had been born too late. This was, and is, a natural, unreasoning, and keenly-felt grievance; and as the stress of rivalry in other

Ex

spheres grew fiercer, as the Germans, duplicating British experience, began to change from a mainly agricultural to a mainly industrial basis, and as they woke, or were prodded awake, to the necessity of a strong navy and a large mercantile marine, the discovery was made that here, too, Great Britain had been before them. Modern, united, and aspiring Germany finds itself in a state of moral rebellion against the results of its lamentable history. cept on the hypothesis of trickery and strife-provoking duplicity, it cannot explain or reconcile itself to the monstrous unfairness of the fact that in the race for trade and Empire Great Britain should have acquired so great a start while Germany was still struggling through blood to attain the indispensable condition of unity. In the last number of this Review, Mr. Sidney Low aptly enough compared the temper of the German people to that of a fox-terrier which has been ill-used in its puppyhood. And that is only part of the German complaint; it is deepened and accentuated by the fate which confines the fox-terrier in its maturity to a kennel too small for it. Germany is little better than an imprisoned Empire. With the mouth of the Rhine, the German Tiber, in the hands of strangers, with a small and weak people astride her busiest river, Germany is like a man denied a key to his own front door. She is cut off from the full freedom of the Baltic and the North Sea, from the Mediterranean and from the Adriatic. The short and difficult coastline between Holland and Denmark forms virtually the sole effective channel for the commerce of this powerful and ambitious nation. And the States-Holland, Denmark, and Belgium-that in this way cramp Germany's development are in all cases weaker than herself. She is walled off by puny, insignificant communities from everything she most vitally needs

for the protection of her security and the full utilization of her strength. Ports, territory, opportunities lie just beyond her boundaries-boundaries, remember, that are artificial, not permanent, drawn by diplomatists, not by nature and their occupation would provide for generations an adequate outlet for her surplus population, her maritime ambitions, and her industrial enterprise. She dare not yield to the temptation thus dangled seductively beneath her very eyes; nor has she yet been able to find any sufficient compensation abroad for her abstinence in Europe. All this, to be sure, is not Great Britain's fault. But the contrast between the paucity and narrowness of Germany's scope for expansion in the present, and our own unlimited spaciousness of action in the recent past, between the complacency with which we take the lion's share of the feast while Germany hunts for the meagre crumbs beneath the table, is too palpable not to be bitterly felt. With human nature as it is, and especially that part of it which concerns itself with international politics, there was bound to be generated a certain atmosphere of friction and jealousy between the two Empires, the one old, somnolent and possessed of trade, colonies, and sea-power, and the other young, aggressive, and in search of trade, colonies, and sea-power.

In endeavoring some two years ago to lay before the American readers of the Atlantic Monthly the broad facts of Anglo-German relations, I observed that they bore witness to two venerable truisms, first, that nothing is really trivial when it comes to a matter of international likes and dislikes; secondly, that in diplomacy the spirit is everything. The various incidents that in the past decade or so have served to keep England and Germany at odds are mainly significant because they have brought about, and have been in

is absent, when confidence, goodwill, and a sincere desire for conciliation obtain in its place, the most formidablelooking issue is found easy of solution. If Great Britain and Germany had only themselves to consider, and were not influenced by their commitments to other Powers, and if international sympathies and aversions were governed by facts and reasoned probabilities instead of by unthinking impulses, baseless conjectures, and ignorant perversities, it would not be difficult to formulate Anglo-German relations on a rational basis. What has disturbed and confused them has been imported from without, not generated from within. Indeed, the most curious feature of the Anglo-German feud is that the two nations are in contact hardly anywhere and in specific and exclusive conflict nowhere. If they had something definite to quarrel about there would be a far greater chance of appeasement between them. The people who inquire why we cannot reach a settlement with Germany as we reached one with France and with Rus-. sia, forget that in the two latter cases the material for an accommodation was provided by tangible clashes of interests in various parts of the world which could be harmonized by a giveand-take compromise. The situation in regard to Germany is wholly different. There is an undoubted AngloGerman question in the large, vague sense. But there are no Anglo-German questions that could be made the subject of a diplomatic bargain, stated in black and white, and solved by a matter-of-fact negotiation. What the British and German peoples are for the most part upholding against one another is not a set of interests, but a set of suspicions. Most of the issues be

tween them are compounded of the apprehensions each has formed of the tendencies of the other's policy, and of the motives behind it, and of the possibilities that in some undated future may conceivably flow from it. And as these are apprehensions that in the nature of things can hardly ever be brought to the test of fact, and that relate not to to-day or to to-morrow but to the year after next, or some other conveniently elusive epoch, their very indefiniteness gives them a certain credibility and makes them peculiarly impervious to exposure by argument or by any reference to immediate actualities. The result is that two pacific, civilized, and otherwise sensible peoples have been stirred up by the extremists in their midst to bombard one another with a fusilade of almost identical charges. The first thing, indeed, that a dispassionate analysis of AngloGerman recriminations reveals is that all the schemes and ambitions the antiGermans in England impute to Germany, the Anglophobes in Germany impute to England; that King Edward was just as much the bugaboo of the German, as is the Kaiser of the British, imagination; that our talk about Germany's military hegemony in Europe is countered by their talk of British naval hegemony throughout the world; and that our vision of a German invasion is fully matched by theirs of the "preventive war" we intend to wage before the German fleet becomes too powerful. Three-fourths

of the antagonism that has thus been manufactured out of a paper warfare of railings, mare's nests, and international tu quoques, is simply a nightmare of the imagination and suggests the need of reinforcing the tribunal at The Hague with an alienist's consulting-room.

The first touch of substance and reality in the Anglo-German exchange of animosities came with the Anglo