With the powerful engine into which we are transforming the German army one does not make an attack.  If I were to come before you today, on the assumption that conditions were different from what I believe they are, and said, “We are considerably menaced by France and Russia; it is to be expected that we shall be attacked, and as a diplomat, believing my military information in these matters to be correct, I am convinced that it is better for us to have our defense consist of a bold attack, and to strike the first blow now;” and if I added:  “We can more easily wage an aggressive war, and I, therefore, am asking the Reichstag for an appropriation of a milliard, or half a milliard, marks to engage in a war against our two neighbors,”—­then I do not know, gentlemen, whether you would have enough confidence in me to grant my request, but I hope you would not have it.

But, if you had, it would not satisfy me.  If we Germans wish to wage a war with the full effect of our national strength, it must be a war which satisfies all who take part in it, all who sacrifice anything for it, in short the whole nation.  It must be a national war, a war carried on with the enthusiasm of 1870, when we were foully attacked.  I still remember the ear splitting, joyful shouts in the station at Koeln.  It was the same all the way from Berlin to Koeln, in Berlin itself.  The waves of popular approval bore us into the war, whether or no we wished it.  That is the way it must be, if a popular force like ours is to show what it can do.  It will, however, be very difficult to prove to the provinces and the imperial states and their inhabitants that the war is unavoidable, and has to be.  People will ask:  “Are you so sure?  Who can tell?” In short, when we make an attack, the whole weight of all imponderables, which weigh far heavier than material weights, will be on the side of our opponents whom we have attacked.  France will be bristling with arms way down to the Pyrenees.  The same will take place everywhere.  A war into which we are not borne by the will of the people will be waged, to be sure, if it has been declared by the constituted authorities who deemed it necessary; it will even be waged pluckily, and possibly victoriously, after we have once smelled fire and tasted blood, but it will lack from the beginning the nerve and enthusiasm of a war in which we are attacked.  In such a one the whole of Germany from Memel to the Alpine Lakes will flare up like a powder mine; it will be bristling with guns, and no enemy will dare to engage this furor teutonicus which develops when we are attacked.

[Illustration:  ANTON VON WERNER WILLIAM I ON HIS DEATHBED]