"The whole of Germany is charged with electricity.

Everybody's nerves are tense.

It needs only a spark to set the whole thing off." The "spark" came two weeks afterward with the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand.
* * * * * "It is all a bad business," Colonel House wrote to Page when war broke out, "and just think how near we came to making such a catastrophe impossible! If England had moved a little faster and had let me go back to Germany, the thing, perhaps, could have been done." To which Page at once replied: "No, no, no--no power on earth could have prevented it.

The German militarism, which is _the_ crime of the last fifty years, has been working for this for twenty-five years.

It is the logical result of their spirit and enterprise and doctrine.