Before the War | Page 8

growing superiority in the application to industry of scientific knowledge and in power to organize her resources founded on it; and her rulers hoped, and not without good ground, to succeed by these means in the peaceful penetration of the world.
I had personally for some time been busy in pressing the then somewhat coldly received claims for a better system of education, higher and technical as well as elementary, among my own countrymen, and had met with some success in asking for the establishment of teaching universities and of technical colleges, such as the new Imperial College of Science and Technology at South Kensington. Of these we had very substantially increased the number during the eight years which preceded my visit to Berlin; but I had learned from visits of inspection to Germany that much more remained to be done before we could secure our commercial and industrial position against the unhasting but unresting efforts of our formidable competitor.
As to the German people outside official circles and the universities, I thought of them then what I think of them now. They were very much like our own people, except in one thing. This was that they were trained simply to obey, and to carry out whatever they were told by their rulers. I used, during numerous unofficial tours in Germany, to wander about incognito, and to smoke and drink beer with the peasants and the people whenever I could get the chance. What impressed me was the little part they had in directing their own government, and the little they knew about what it was doing. There was a general disposition to accept, as a definition of duty which must not be questioned, whatever they were told to do by the Vorstand. It is this habit of mind, dating back to the days of Frederick the Great, with only occasional and brief interruptions, which has led many people to think that the German people at large have in them "a double dose of original sin." Even when their soldiers have been exceptionally brutal in methods of warfare, I do not think that this is so. The habit of mind which prevails is that of always looking to the rulers for orders, and the brutality has been that enjoined--in accordance with its own military policy of shortening war by making it terrible to the enemy--by the General Staff of Germany, a body before whose injunctions even the Emperor, so far as my observation goes, always has bowed.
But I must now return to my formal visit to Berlin in the autumn of 1906. I was, as I have already said, everywhere cordially welcomed, and at the end the heads of the German Army entertained me at a dinner in the War Office, at which the War Minister presided, and there was present, among others, the Chief of the German General Staff. They were all friendly. I do not think that my impression was wrong that even the responsible heads of the Army were then looking almost entirely to "peaceful penetration," with only moral assistance from the prestige attaching to the possession of great armed forces in reserve. Our business in the United Kingdom was therefore to see that we were prepared for perils that might unexpectedly arise out of this policy, and not less, by developing our educational and industrial organization, to make ourselves fit to meet the greater likelihood of a coming keen competition in the peaceful arts.
One thing that seemed to me essential for the preservation of good relations was that cordial and frequent intercourse between the people of the two countries should be encouraged and developed. I set myself in my speeches to avoid all expressions which might be construed as suggesting a critical attitude on our part, or a failure to recognize the existence of peaceful ideas among what was then, as I still think, a large majority of the people of Germany. The attitude of some newspapers in England, and still more that of the chauvinist minority in Germany itself, did not render this quite an easy task. But there were good people in these days in Germany as well as in England, and the United States might be counted on as likely to co-operate in discouraging friction.
Meanwhile there was the chance that the course of this policy might be interrupted by some event which we could not control. A conversation with the then Chief of the German General Staff, General von Moltke, the nephew of the great man of that name, satisfied me that he did not really look with any pleasurable military expectation to the results of a war with the United Kingdom alone. It would, he observed to me, be in his opinion a long and possibly indecisive war, and must result in much