A General Sketch of the European War | Page 5

whether we will allow any part of our
colonies to become German or any part of our great dependencies to
fall under German rule, the answer is in the negative."

The French would answer: "We do not happen to think that we are
either decadent or corrupt, nor do we plead guilty to any other of your
vague and very pedantic charges; but quite apart from that, on the
concrete point of whether we propose to be subjugated by a foreign
Power, German or other, the answer is in the negative. Our will is here
in conflict with yours. And before you can proceed to any act of
mastery over us, you will have to fight. Moreover, we shall not put
aside the duty of ultimately fighting you so long as a population of two
millions, who feel themselves to be French (though most of them are
German-speaking) and who detest your rule, are arbitrarily kept in
subjection by you in Alsace-Lorraine."
The Russians would reply: "We cannot help being numerically stronger
than you, and we do not propose to diminish our numbers even if we
could. We do not think we are barbaric; and as to our leadership of the
Slav people in the Balkans, that seems as right and natural to us,
particularly on religious grounds, as any such bond could be. It may
interfere with your ambitions; but if you propose that we should
abandon so obvious an attitude of leadership among the Slavs, the
answer is in the negative." There is here, therefore, again a conflict of
wills.
In general, what the German peoples desired, based upon what they
believed themselves to be, was sharply at issue with what the English
people, what the French people, what the Russian people respectively
desired. Their desires were also based upon what they believed
themselves to be, and they thought themselves to be very different from
what Germany thought them to be. The English did not believe that
they had sneaked their empire; the French did not believe that they
were moribund; the Russians did not believe that they were savages.
It was impossible that the German will should impose itself without
coming at once into conflict with these other national wills. It was
impossible that the German ideal should seek to realize itself without
coming into conflict with the mere desire to live, let alone the
self-respect, of everybody else.
And the consequence of such a conflict in ideals and wills translated

into practice was this war.
* * * * *
But the war would not have come nor would it have taken the shape
that it did, but for two other factors in the problem which we must next
consider. These two other factors are, first, the position and tradition of
Prussia among the German States; secondly, the peculiar authority
exercised by the Imperial House of Hapsburg-Lorraine at Vienna over
its singularly heterogeneous subjects.
(3) PRUSSIA.
The Germans have always been, during their long history, a race
inclined to perpetual division and sub-division, accompanied by war
and lesser forms of disagreement between the various sections. Their
friends have called this a love of freedom, their enemies political
incompetence; but, without giving it a good or a bad name, the plain
fact has been, century after century, that the various German tribes
would not coalesce. Any one of them was always willing to take
service with the Roman Empire, in the early Roman days, against any
one of the others, and though there have been for short periods more or
less successful attempts to form one nation of them all in imitation of
the more civilized States to the west and south, these attempts have
never succeeded for very long.
But it so happens that about two hundred years ago, or a little more,
there appeared one body of German-speaking men rather different from
the rest, and capable ultimately of leading the rest, or at least a majority
of the rest.
[Illustration: Sketch 2.]
I use the words "German-speaking" and "rather different" because this
particular group of men, though speaking German, were of less pure
German blood than almost any other of the peoples that spoke that
tongue. They were the product of a conquest undertaken late in the
Middle Ages by German knights over a mixed Pagan population,

Lithuanian and Slavonic, which inhabited the heaths and forests along
the Baltic Sea. These German knights succeeded in their task, and
compelled the subject population to accept Christianity, just as the
Germans themselves had been compelled to accept it by their more
powerful and civilized neighbours the French hundreds of years before.
The two populations of this East Baltic district, the large majority
which was Slavonic and Lithuanian, and the minority which was really
German, mixed and produced a third thing,