See the bibliography given in _General Books_ below.] The political causes of the present war, then, and of the half century of Armed Peace which preceded it are to be found, not in the particular schemes and ambitions of any of the governments of Europe, nor in their secret diplomacy, nor in the machinations of the great armament interests allied to them, sinister though all these may have been, but in the nature of some of those governments themselves, and in their relation to the peoples over whom they rule.
"If it were possible," writes Prince Buellow, who directed German policy as Imperial Chancellor from 1900 to 1909, "for members of different nationalities, with different language and customs, and an intellectual life of a different kind, to live side by side in one and the same State, without succumbing to the temptation of each trying to force his own nationality on the other, things on earth would look a good deal more peaceful.

But it is a law of life and development in history that where two national civilisations meet they fight for ascendancy.

In the struggle between nationalities one nation is the hammer and the other the anvil; one is the victor and the other the vanquished."[1] No words could indicate more clearly the cause that is at stake in the present war.

They show us that there are still governments in Europe so ignorant as to believe that the different nationalities of mankind are necessarily hostile to one another, and so foolish and brutal as to think that national civilisation, or, as the German Professors call it, "culture," can and indeed must be propagated by the sword.

It is this extraordinary conception which is at the back of protests like that of Professor Haeckel and Professor Eucken (men whom, in the field of their own studies, all Europe is proud to honour) against "England fighting with a half-Asiatic power against Germanism."[2] [Footnote 1: _Imperial Germany_, by Prince Bernhard von Buelow, English translation, 1st ed.pp.