Peaceless Europe | Page 6

in the case of the iron industry, threw a mysterious and threatening shadow over the granitic edifice of the Empire.
When I was Minister of Commerce in 1913 I received a deputation of German business men who wished to confer with me on the Italian customs regime. They spoke openly of the necessity of possessing themselves of the iron mines of French Lorraine; they looked upon war as an industrial fact. Germany had enough coal but not enough iron, and the Press of the iron industry trumpeted forth loud notes of war. After the conclusion of peace, when France, through a series of wholly unexpected events, saw Germany prostrate at her feet and without an army, the same phenomenon took place. The iron industry tends to affirm itself in France; she has the iron and now she wants coal. Should she succeed in getting it, German production would be doomed. To deprive Germany of Upper Silesia would mean killing production after having disorganized it at the very roots of its development.
Seven years ago, or thereabouts, Germany was flourishing in an unprecedented manner and presented the most favourable conditions for developing. Her powerful demographic structure was almost unique. Placed in the centre of Europe after having withstood the push of so many peoples, she had attained an unrivalled economic position.
Close to Germany the Austro-Hungarian Empire united together eleven different peoples, not without difficulty, and this union tended to the common elevation of all. The vast monarchy, the result of a slow aggregation of violence and of administrative wisdom, represented, perhaps, the most interesting historic attempt on the part of different peoples to achieve a common rule and discipline on the same territory. Having successfully weathered the most terrible financial crises, and having healed in half a century the wounds of two great wars which she had lost, Austria-Hungary lived in the effort of holding together Germans, Magyars, Slavs and Italians without their flying at each others' throats. Time will show how the effort of Austria-Hungary has not been lost for civilization.
Russia represented the largest empire which has ever been in existence, and in spite of its defective political regime was daily progressing. Perhaps for the first time in history an immense empire of twenty-one millions and a half of square kilometres, eighty-four times the size of Italy, almost three times as large as the United States of America, was ruled by a single man. From the Baltic to the Yellow Sea, from Finland to the Caucasus, one law and one rule governed the most different peoples scattered over an immense territory. The methods by which, after Peter the Great, the old Duchy of Muscovy had been transformed into an empire, still lived in the administration; they survive to-day in the Bolshevist organization, which represents less a revolution than a hieratic and brutal form of violence placed at the service of a political organization.
The war between Russia and Japan had revealed all the perils of a political organization exclusively based on central authority represented by a few irresponsible men under the apparent rule of a sovereign not gifted with the slightest trace of will power.
Those who exalt nationalist sentiments and pin their faith on imperialistic systems fail to realize that while the greatest push towards the War came from countries living under a less liberal regime, those very countries gave proof of the least power of resistance. Modern war means the full exploitation of all the human and economic resources of each belligerent country. The greater a nation's wealth the greater is the possibility to hold out, and the perfection of arms and weapons is in direct ratio with the degree of technical progress attained. Moreover, the combatants and the possibility of using them are in relation with the number of persons who possess sufficient skill and instruction to direct the war. Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, the United States of America, were able without any appreciable effort to improvise an enormous number of officers for the War, transforming professional men, engineers and technicians into officers. Russia, who did not have a real industrial bourgeoisie nor a sufficient development of the middle classes, was only able to furnish an enormous number of combatants, but an insufficient organization from a technical and military point of view, and a very limited number of officers. While on a peace footing her army was the most numerous in the world, over one million three hundred thousand men; when her officers began to fail Russia was unable to replace them so rapidly as the proportion of nine or ten times more than normal required by the War.
Russia has always had a latent force of development; there is within her a vis inertiae equivalent to a mysterious energy of expansion. Her birth-rate is higher than that of any other