mendacious, and many will throw up their hands in presence of the mutual accusations and declare that it is impossible to assign the responsibility. That is a fatal concession to immorality, and we must hold that in some one or more of the combatant nations the Churches have, for some reason or other, acquiesced in a crime.
The plea is valid only to this extent, that the guilty nations in this case were notoriously Germany and Austria-Hungary, and therefore one cannot pass any censure on British Christians for supporting the war. I have in other works dealt so fully with the guilt of those two nations that here I must be content to assume it. The general and incessant cry of the German people, that they are only defending their Empire against malignant enemies, must be understood in the light of their recent history and literature. No Power in the world had given any indication of a wish to destroy Germany; there were, at the most, a few uninfluential appeals in England for an attack on Germany, but solely on the ground that it meditated an attack on England, and the accumulated evidence now shows that it did meditate such an attack. England did not desire an acre of German ground. France had assuredly not forgotten Alsace and Lorraine, but France would have had no support, and would have failed ignominiously, in an aggressive campaign to secure those provinces. On the other hand, an immense and weighty literature, which is unfortunately very little known in England, has familiarised Germany for fifteen years with aggressive ideas. The most authoritative writers claimed that, as they said repeatedly, "Germany must and will expand"; and leagues which numbered millions of subscribers propa-
