Ex-Dean Faculties of Political Science, Philosophy, Pure Science and Fine Arts, Columbia University; Roosevelt Professor of American History and Institutions at Friedrich Wilhelms University, Berlin, 1906; Visiting American Professor at Austrian Universities, 1914-15.
Under the head of "An Anti-British Pamphlet," The London Times of Aug. 23, 1914, noted as follows:
The Vossischezeitung gives extracts from a brochure issued under the auspices of a committee of such prominent Germans as Prince Bülow, Herr Ballin, Dr. von Gwinner, and Field Marshal von der Goltz, for the purpose of "opening the eyes" of the United States regarding the causes of the present war. Copies of this pamphlet are being given to all Americans returning home from Germany. One chapter, headed "Neutrality by Grace of England," scoffs at the idea of England today being the defender of neutral States and declares that it was England who in 1911 was ready to land 160,000 men at Antwerp to help the French against the Germans.
As to who will ultimately win in the war, the pamphlet asks whether it will be the striving nation, the young strength, or the old peoples, France and England, with their flagging civilization in alliance with Muscovite retrogression.
HOW THE WAR CAME ABOUT.
Who is responsible for the war?—Not Germany! England's policy! Her shifting of responsibility and promoting the struggle while alone possessing power to avert it.
It is an old and common experience that after the outbreak of a war the very parties and persons that wanted the war, either at once or later, assert that the enemy wanted and began it. The German Empire especially always had to suffer from such untruthful assertions, and the very first days of the present terrible European war confirm again this old experience. Again Russian, French, and British accounts represent the German Empire as having wanted the war.
Only a few months ago influential men and newspapers of Great Britain as well as of Paris could be heard to express the opinion that nobody in Europe wanted war and that especially the German Emperor and his Government had sincerely and effectively been working for peace. Especially the English Government, in the course of the last two years, asserted frequently and publicly, and was supported by The Westminster Gazette and a number of influential English newspapers in the assertion, that Great Britain and the German Empire during the Balkan crisis of the last few years had always met on the same platform for the preservation of peace. The late Secretary of State, von Kiderlen-Waechter, his successor, Mr. von Jagow, and the Imperial Chancellor, von Bethmann-Hollweg, likewise declared repeatedly in the Reichstag, how great their satisfaction was that a close and confidential diplomatic co-operation with Great Britain, especially in questions concerning the Near East, had become a fact. And it has to be acknowledged today that at that time the German and British interests in the Near East were identical or at any rate ran in parallel lines.