Page:The guilt of William Hohenzollern.djvu/15

Rh line should be altered without my consent. I was also to receive every facility for seeing the work through the press. They begged me to sanction the publication.

These two gentlemen were therefore, to all intents and purposes, merely commissioned to subject my work to a supervision which I had no reason to shun, and to attend to all those minor details which are necessarily associated with the printing of a work of this class, and which I was glad to leave in their hands.

As I was not at all concerned about my own personality, but very much about the work in hand, I saw no reason to sulk in a corner, and I declared myself willing to co-operate in the work provided the material went to press at once.

This, too, was promised me, and so this collection of documents of the Foreign Office about the outbreak of the war, which had almost become a myth, has at last made its appearance.

Naturally, in the course of the work I had not contented myself with merely stringing the material together. I felt compelled to bring into relation with each other all the revelations offered by a mass of nearly nine hundred documents, and to bring out their connection with the remaining and already-known material connected with the outbreak of the war. I did this not as a partisan, but as an historian, who is simply anxious to discover how things came about.

I undertook this work in the first instance merely for my own satisfaction. An historian cannot collect materials without inwardly working over them. But the more the work progressed, the more keenly I desired that it should not be done for myself alone, but for the great mass of the public, who would have less time and,