This idea has been clearly expressed of late in the German press. It is
based on the belief that the war was prepared by skillful British
intrigues inspired by jealousy of Germany. German statesmen cannot
conceive that nations should fight for any cause loftier than material
"interests." Hence the constant mistakes of their diplomacy and its
failure to foresee that little Belgium would resist German pretensions
or that England would go to war for "a scrap of paper." Now they imagine
that the determination of France to fight to the last in defense of her
honor and her superior civilization can be undermined by an offer to
mitigate the material losses she may suffer from the war.
The German view was most clearly expressed in the remarkable dispatch to
the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant from its Berlin correspondent, which
was reproduced in The Times of yesterday. Politicians in Berlin, he
wrote,
see in England the land which has brought about the outbreak of the
war by finely played intrigue, in order to let dangerous Russia
bleed herself to death, to the end that against Germany, even a
victorious Germany, she may herself acquire great advantages, both
in trade and on the sea, and in order to make France entirely
dependent upon her.
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