"Germany has been growing rapidly. Her birth rate has been high, but of late it has been falling, and when the war began there were indications that she soon would approach the low ratio of population increase already characteristic of France, of New England and the Middle West in the United States, and lately of England. But Germany's population was still a growing one and, in a sense, a restive one.
"The Malthusian theory has not worked out in the civilized world as Malthus supposed it would, for the application of science to manufacturing, agriculture, &c., has prevented increasing populations from pressing upon the means of subsistence; but in all parts of the Western World the standards of living have been raised, the ambitions of the average man and woman have expanded. They have lived better than their parents lived, and they have wished their children to live better still.
"However, we can place no limit upon the probable expansion of human desires, and it is true that a population unchecked by the intelligent action of the human will tends to increase at a rate more rapid than that at which it is possible to raise the actual plane of human living.
"The speed of the working of the two rules is different, perhaps, but both are dynamic, and the population of Germany tended to grow more rapidly than betterment of conditions could be provided, even under the nation's splendid governmental and commercial efficiency.
"The natural yearning of the nation, therefore, was toward colonial expansion, and, although note that I make no charges against either the German Government or German people, the nation probably has wished sovereignty over Western Europe, through Belgium and Holland to the sea. Its narrow outlet through Hamburg and Bremen was insufficient for its needs.
"Of course, its trade and economic advance has sometimes conflicted with that of other nations. It is natural for Germany to suppose that England tried to block it. However, I think that all the evidence which Germany has brought forward in proof of this is weak and improbable, because England's great source of revenue has been her foreign trade, and, above all, her carrying trade, and I am not partisan but stating the obvious when I say that England prospers when the rest of the world prospers, and that she has profited mightily through Germany's commercial advance.
"These facts point to the conclusion that Germany really had everything to gain by avoiding war and continuing her prosperous expansion along commercial lines, increasing the strength of her grip in foreign countries, as, for example, in South America."
Germany's Prosperous Commerce.
"In South America we Americans were not really competing with her. She had studied the market and adopted the methods necessary to its satisfaction; we had not. England was relatively losing her hold there. In another twenty years Germany surely would have been one of the greatest commercial and manufacturing nations which the world has ever known. So it was not economic necessity, nor pressure approaching economic necessity, which precipitated this war.
"I think the German people, as they professed to do, did become greatly alarmed over a possibility, magnified into a probability, that Russia, taking up the cause of the Balkan peoples, would obtain Constantinople, that Servia would make her way to the Adriatic, and that all possibility of the expansion of Germany to the southeast would be blocked, and Germany probably became alarmed over England's intentions—there were many indications of something close to panic in Germany after it was generally understood that King Edward figured in the pact with France.