From the original publisher: No cataclysm, not even the French Revolution or the Napoleonic Wars, nor earthquake or any other force of nature has so convulsed the whole current of human life and thought, or devastated property and destroyed life as has the great war which rages in Europe and affects a large part of the rest of the civilized world to-day. The effects of this war are now felt, consciously or unconsciously, by every man, woman, and child, and its results will influence and have direct bearing on the lives of unborn millions. The first volume is devoted to a consideration of the events and conditions forming the potential and positive causes of the war and contains a well-tempered and nonpartisan examination into the motives that have led to this great conflict. It shows us that the Welt-politik, or general policy of Germany, was not, from Germany’s point of view, fundamentally unjustifiable, and that the war between the western powers is only incidentally a commercial war ; that Great Britain and Germany would not have gone to war on their own impulse; that aside from the invasion of Belgium, which was the positive, direct, and formal cause for Great Britain’s participation in the war, there was only the apprehension caused by the sudden growth of the German navy as a potential cause; it proves that commercial rivalry was only very remotely connected with the various reasons for the war and that it ought not to be regarded as a cause at all; that the war so commonly regarded as one between Great Britain and Germany for supremacy in the west grew out of the inevitable clash between the Slav and the Teuton in the Balkans; and that in the Balkan peninsula existed the critical situation out of which the conflict necessarily emerged.
550 pages
