Excerpt from My "Little Bit" What their rivals print in others, unless it happens to be by one of their own special clique, or the utter ance of a Cabinet Minister, which they generally misquote. But, such as they are, these various contri butions to English and American sections of journalism indicate the straight and loyal road my pen has travelled during the Wickedest and stupidest war that ever devastated the world. The stupidity of it was even more glaring than the wickedness of it - especially in the case of Germany. Germany was an advancing and prosperous nation, chiefly through the industrial progress of her hard-working people, and her peaceful penetration was conquering every quarter of commerce. She has, for the time being, ruined everything by a blind faith in and following of her scoundrels of finance, for whom the Krupp and other dividends were not sufficiently high or secure; the work of years has now been destroyed and every gain has to be dis counted as loss, though there is not the slightest doubt that her cleverness and cunning will enable her to mend the hole in her wall far more rapidly than our dilly-dally statesmen imagine. For the immediate time, her degradation and ruin involve more than her own position; other nations, even our own, are deeply affected, and, like ships in unsafe anchorage, sway from their moorings - all are tormented by a Spirit of turbulence which will not let them rest, and men with weak brains and vacillating purpose are playing with the destinies of peoples in a wholly unforseeing and nerveless way, heedless of the fact that there are other more powerful players behind them who are about to make an end of their game and push them far away from the goal. In what I have written. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.