immediate responsibility for the World War falls upon Serbia, France and Russia, with the guilt about equally distributed. Next in order—far below France and Russia—would come Austria, though she never desired a general European war. Finally, we place Germany and England as tied for last place, both being opposed to war in the 1914 crisis. Probably the German public was somewhat more favorable to military activity than the English people, but ... the Kaiser made much more strenuous efforts to preserve the peace of Europe in 1914 than did Sir Edward Grey. The German government so liked Barnes's writings on the causes of World War I that it provided free copies of his articles to hand out at German embassies around the world. Though most German historians in the 1920s regarded Barnes merely as a propagandist whose work was mainly meant to appeal to a mass as opposed to an academic audience, the right-wing German historian Hans Herzfeld called Barnes's work "a document in the struggle against the war guilt thesis whose noble spirit cannot be appreciated enough". The German-Canadian historian Holger Herwig has commented that Barnes's work on the origins of World War I, together with others of a similar bent, did immense scholarly damage, as generations of university students accepted Barnes' "apologias" for Germany as the truth. In 1969, the British historian A. J. P. Taylor called The Genesis of the World War "the most preposterously pro-German" account of the outbreak of war in 1914. In 1926, the American historian Bernadotte Schmitt wrote about The Genesis of the World War that: It must be said that Mr. Barnes' book falls short of being the objective and scientific analysis of the great problems which is so urgently needed. As a protest against the old notion of unique German responsibility for the war, it will be welcomed by all honest men, but as an attempt to set up a new doctrine of unique Franco-Russian responsibility, it must be unhesitatingly rejected. The war was a consequence, perhaps inevitable, of the whole system of alliances and armaments, and in the origin, development, and working of that system, the Central Powers, more particularly Germany, played a conspicuous part. Indeed, it was Germany that put the system to the test in July 1914. Because the test failed, she is not entitled to claim that no responsibility attaches to her. In 1980, the American historian