The first, of course, if not the burning question of the controversy was, who started the war, and why? The German at home showed a certain impatience at this query, as a politician might at a question that he had already repeatedly explained to his constituents. But with care and perseverance he could usually be drawn into the discussion, whereupon he outlined the prevailing opinion, with such minor variations as his slight individuality permitted; almost always without heat, always without that stone-blind prejudice that is so frequent among the Allied man in the street. Then he fell into apathetic silence or harked back to the ever-present question of food. But let him tell it in his own way.
“The war was started by circumstances. War had become a necessity to an over-prosperous world, as bleeding sometimes becomes necessary to a fat person. Neither side was wholly and deliberately guilty of beginning it, but if there is actual personal guilt, it is chiefly that of the Allies, especially England. We understand the hatred of France. It came largely from fear, though to a great extent unnecessary fear. The ruling party in Russia wanted war, wanted it as early as 1909, for without it they would have lost their power. It was a question of interior politics with them. But with England there was less excuse. In her case it was only envy and selfishness; the petty motives that sprout in a shopkeeper’s soul. We were making successful _concurrenz_ against her in all the markets of the world—though by our German word ‘_concurrenz_’ we mean more than mere commercial competition; she saw herself in danger of losing the hegemony of Europe, her position as the most important nation on the globe. She set out deliberately to destroy us, to _vernichten_, to bring us to nothing. We hate”—though come to think of it I do not recall once having heard a German use the word hate in describing his own feelings, nor did I run across any reference to the notorious “Hymn of Hate” during all my travels through the Empire—“we dislike, then, we blame England most, for it was she more than any other one party in the controversy who planned and nourished it. How? By making an Entente against us that surrounded us with a steel wall; by bolstering up the _revanche_ feeling in France; by urging on the ruling class in Russia; by playing on the dormant brutality of the Russian masses and catering to the natural fanaticism of the French, deliberately keeping alive their desire to recover Alsace-Lorraine. Edward VII set the ball rolling with his constant visits to Paris.”