The writer has seen those steps well and carefully laid, tested and tried beforehand.

Every rung of the scaling ladder being raised for the storming of the German defences on land and sea was planed and polished in the British Foreign Office.
As Sir Edward Grey confessed three years ago, he was "but the fly on the wheel." That wheel was the ever faster driven purpose of Great Britain to destroy the growing sea-power and commerce of Germany.

The strain had reached the breaking point.
During the first six months of 1914, German export trade almost equalled that of Great Britain.

Another year of peace, and it would certainly have exceeded it, and for the first time in the history of world trade Great Britain would have been put in the second place.
German exports from January to June had swelled to the enormous total of $1,045,000,000 as against the $1,075,000,000 of Great Britain.

A war against such figures could not be maintained in the markets, it must be transferred to the seas.
Day by day as the war proceeds, although it is now only six weeks old, the pretences under which it was begun are being discarded.