Armageddon--And After | Page 4

such an
equilibrium of rival forces that the total result would be stability and
peace. Arbitration, too, was considered by many as the panacea, to say
nothing of the Hague Palace of Peace. And now we discover that
nations may possibly refer to arbitration points of small importance in
their quarrels, but that the greater things which are supposed to touch

national honour and the preservation of national life are tacitly, if not
formally, exempted from the category of arbitrable disputes.
Diplomacy, Arbitration, Palaces of Peace seem equally useless.
PROXIMATE AND ULTIMATE CAUSES
In attempting to understand how Europe has (to use Lord Rosebery's
phrase) "rattled into barbarism" in the uncompromising fashion which
we see before our eyes, we must distinguish between recent operative
causes and those more slowly evolving antecedent conditions which
play a considerable, though not necessarily an obvious part in the result.
Recent operative causes are such things as the murder of the Archduke
Franz Ferdinand at Serajevo, the consequent Austrian ultimatum to
Servia, the hasty and intemperate action of the Kaiser in forcing war,
and--from a more general point of view--the particular form of
militarism prevalent in Germany. Ulterior antecedent conditions are to
be found in the changing history of European States and their mutual
relations in the last quarter of a century; the ambition of Germany to
create an Imperial fleet; the ambition of Germany to have "a place in
the sun" and become a large colonial power; the formation of a Triple
Entente following on the formation of a Triple Alliance; the rivalry
between Teuton and Slav; and the mutations of diplomacy and
_Real-politik_. It is not always possible to keep the two sets of causes,
the recent and the ulterior, separate, for they naturally tend either to
overlap or to interpenetrate one another. German Militarism, for
instance, is only a specific form of the general ambition of Germany,
and the Austrian desire to avenge herself on Servia is a part of her
secular animosity towards Slavdom and its protector, Russia. Nor yet,
when we are considering the present _débâcle_ of civilisation, need we
interest ourselves overmuch in the immediate occasions and
circumstances of the huge quarrel. We want to know not how Europe
flared into war, but why. Our object is so to understand the present
imbroglio as to prevent, if we can, the possibility for the future of any
similar world-wide catastrophe.
EUROPEAN DICTATORS
Let us fix our attention on one or two salient points. Europe has often

been accustomed to watch with anxiety the rise of some potent arbiter
of her destinies who seems to arrogate to himself a large personal
dominion. There was Philip II. There was Louis XIV. There was
Napoleon a hundred years ago. Then, a mere shadow of his great
ancestor, there was Napoleon III. Then, after the Franco-German war,
there was Bismarck. Now it is Kaiser Wilhelm II. The emergence of
some ambitious personality naturally makes Europe suspicious and
watchful, and leads to the formation of leagues and confederations
against him. The only thing, however, which seems to have any power
of real resistance to the potential tyrant is not the manoeuvring of
diplomats, but the steady growth of democracy in Europe, which, in
virtue of its character and principles, steadily objects to the despotism
of any given individual, and the arbitrary designs of a personal will. We
had hoped that the spread of democracies in all European nations would
progressively render dynastic wars an impossibility. The peoples would
cry out, we hoped, against being butchered to make a holiday for any
latter-day Cæsar. But democracy is a slow growth, and exists in very
varying degrees of strength in different parts of our continent.
Evidently it has not yet discovered its own power. We have sadly to
recognise that its range of influence and the new spirit which it seeks to
introduce into the world are as yet impotent against the personal
ascendancy of a monarch and the old conceptions of high politics.
European democracy is still too vague, too dispersed, too unorganised,
to prevent the breaking out of a bloody international conflict.
THE PERSONAL FACTOR
Europe then has still to reckon with the personal factor--with all its
vagaries and its desolating ambitions. Let us see how this has worked
in the case before us. In 1888 the present German Emperor ascended
the throne. Two years afterwards, in March 1890, the Pilot was
dropped--Bismarck resigned. The change was something more than a
mere substitution of men like Caprivi and Hohenlohe for the Iron
Chancellor. There was involved a radical alteration in policy. The
Germany which was the ideal of Bismarck's dreams was an
exceedingly prosperous self-contained country, which should flourish
mainly because it developed its internal industries as well as paid

attention to its agriculture, and secured its somewhat