Above the Reichstag is the Bundesrat or Federal Council, on which all the Federated States are represented, Prussia having seventeen members as against forty-two from the other States. The Bundesrat sits in secret; its members are selected by the different State Governments and vote according to instructions received. All Bills originate in the Bundesrat before they are submitted to the Reichstag, and are re-submitted to the Bundesrat, to be passed or vetoed, after alteration in the Reichstag. The twenty-six members of the German Federation represented in the Bundesrat comprise four kingdoms (Prussia, Bavaria, Wuertemberg, and Saxony), a number of Grand Duchies and smaller ducal States, three Free Cities (Hamburg, Luebeck, and Bremen), and the Imperial Territory of Alsace-Lorraine. All these (except the last named) preserve their own local Parliaments and institutions, and the second largest, Bavaria, even preserves in peace-time, like the British self-governing Dominions, her own military organisation and has also her own postal system. But Prussia in size, influence, and military strength is by far the most important, and for practical purposes her power preponderates over that of all the other States combined. The real control of legislation naturally lies with the State which controls two-fifths of the votes in the Bundesrat, where legislation is initiated and can be vetoed; it is wielded by the Kaiser, as King of Prussia, and by his Imperial Chancellor, President of the Bundesrat and always a Prussian Minister. The Imperial Chancellor, who is the only Imperial Minister, is chosen by the Kaiser and is responsible to him alone: he countersigns all the Kaiser's orders and edicts, and has the function, it may be added, of explaining away his indiscretions.

It is inevitable, under these circumstances, that the policy and legislation of the central government should largely reflect Prussian views and ideals. On the other hand, the temper of the rest of Germany must always be kept in mind. As Prince Buellow, the late Imperial Chancellor, says: "If the Empire is governed without reference to Prussia, ill-will towards the Empire will grow in that country. If Prussia is governed without reference to the Empire, then there is the danger that mistrust and dislike of the leading State will gain ground in non-Prussian Germany.... The art of governing in our country will always have to be directed chiefly towards maintaining the harmony between Germany and Prussia, in the spirit as well as in the letter."[1]

[Footnote 1: Imperial Germany, pp. 191-192.]

Why should the government of Germany be such an "art"? And why should there be any difficulty in maintaining a harmonious spirit between Prussia and non-Prussian Germany? To answer these questions we must widen the scope of our inquiry. So far we have considered only the growth and development of the German State. It is now time to turn from the German State to the German people.

Sec.2. The Real Germany.—The difficulty of establishing German Unity has lain in the fact that there have really always been two Germanies, different in history, in temper, in ideals, and in their stages of development in civilisation. There has been Prussia, or North-Eastern Germany; and there has been the real Germany, the Germany of the South and West. It is only since 1870, and especially within the reign of the present Kaiser, that, through education and common experience; the two have become fused into one; but even now, beneath the uniform surface of German life and public opinion, there is a great inner distinction.

Let us take what we have called the real Germany first. This Germany, the Germany of the Rhine country, of Frankfurt and Heidelberg and Cologne and Nueremberg, is the Germany which so many Englishmen know and admire. This Germany is an integral part of the civilisation of Western Europe, and is closely akin to ourselves. It has grown and developed alongside with France and the Netherlands and England, sharing in all the great spiritual and social movements of the West. It has passed, with them, through the Middle Ages, the Revival of Learning, the Reformation, and the long struggle against the domination of France. Its famous cities with their Cathedrals and Town Halls breathe the same proud, free, municipal spirit as those of their great neighbours in the Netherlands, Ghent, Antwerp, Louvain, Bruges, Ypres and the rest. Its scholars and teachers, poets, painters, and musicians, from Luther to Goethe, have made their special German contribution to the civilised life of the West—a contribution as great and as unique as that of Renaissance Italy or Elizabethan England. Its people are very similar in character to their neighbours of kindred stock. As industrious as the Dutch, as persevering as the Scotch, as steady and good-hearted as the English, good workers, good citizens, devoted in their family relations, they have found it easy to live at peace and on a good understanding with their neighbours, and when they have migrated abroad, they have by common confession made the best of settlers, both in the United States and in the British Dominions.

Yet they have developed certain characteristic qualities in their social and political life, which distinguish them sharply from their western neighbours. History, which has deprived them, until recently, of a wider citizenship, has left them timid, docile, dreamy and unpractical in just that sphere of action where Englishmen have learnt for centuries to think and to act for themselves. Patriotism with Englishmen is an instinct. We do not much care to wave flags or make speeches or sing songs about it: we assume it as the permanent background of our national life and our national consciousness. With the Germans this is not so. In Germany, partly owing to German history, partly owing to the constitution of the German mind, patriotism is not an instinct but an idea. Now ideas do not grow up in men's minds by a natural process. They have to be implanted. The Germans have needed to be taught to be patriotic. The makers of German patriotism a century ago were teachers and philosophers. They did not simply appeal to their patriotic instincts, as Englishmen would have done: they argued the point and proved that Germany was worth fighting for: they founded a school of patriotic German philosophy. There are few more curious documents in history, or more instructive for the light they shed on future events, than the famous Speeches to the German Nation addressed to his fellow-countrymen by the philosopher Fichte in 1808, when his country was under the heel of Napoleon. They are not speeches at all, but philosophical lucubrations, discussing in abstract terms the whole subject of the nature of patriotism and of Germany's right to exist as a nation. One argument, for instance, on which he lays great stress, is that Germany is marked out to be a great political power because of the peculiar excellence of the German language, which he shows to his satisfaction to be superior to French, Italian, and other Latin languages. Again, he points out that there is no word in the German language for "character" (Karakter), a word borrowed from the Greek; the reason is, he explains, that there is no need for one, because to have character and to be German are the same thing—a curious foretaste of the German arrogance of to-day. Yet these speeches, which, issued in England at such a crisis, would have found no readers, reverberated through Germany and helped to create the self-confident spirit which freed her from the invader. Then, as now, under the inspiration of ideas which they had accepted from professors and philosophers, Germans fought for the German language and for German culture. But whereas in 1814 they fought to preserve them, in 1914 they are fighting to impose them.

Just as patriotism in Germany is wholly different from what it is in England, so also is democracy, and all those elements in the national life which feed and sustain it. British democracy does not depend upon our popular franchise or on any legal rights or enactments. It depends upon the free spirit and self-respect of the British people. We have been accustomed for centuries to the unrestrained discussion of public affairs; and we treat our governors as being in fact, as they are in name, our "ministers" or servants. There is a force called public opinion which, slow though it may be to assert itself, British statesmen have been taught by experience to respect. It is as true of British as it is of American democracy that "you can fool half the people all the time; and you can fool all the people half the time; but you cannot fool all the people all the time." But the German people, as a people, lacks this irreplaceable heritage of political self-respect. It has never yet dared to tread the path of democracy without leading strings. It has not yet learned to think for itself in politics, or formed the habit of free discussion and practical criticism of public affairs. This is the vital fact which must be borne in mind in all comparisons between German and British democracy. The Germans have a Parliament, elected by Universal Male Suffrage. But this Parliament is powerless to control policy, because the nation behind it does not give it sufficient support. It is because of the absence of the driving force of a public opinion in Germany that the German people submit complacently to the infringements on political liberty which form part of the normal regime of German life—the domineering arrogance of officers and officials, the restraints upon the Press and the shameless manufacture of news and inspiration of opinion from official sources, the control of the Universities, the schools, and the public services by the State in the interest of "orthodox" political opinions, and the ridiculous laws which have sent editors and cartoonists to prison in scores for criticising the behaviour and utterances of the Emperor or the Crown Prince. In England and in America underground attempts are sometimes made to injure the careers of men whose opinions are considered "dangerous" by those who employ them. In Germany such interference with freedom of political thought is not the exception: it has become the rule. No man can make a successful career in the public service (and education is a public service) unless he is considered politically "orthodox" (gesinnungstuechtig); and orthodoxy does not simply mean abstention from damaging criticism or dangerous opinions: it means, in practice, deference to the opinions of those who "know better," that is, to the clique of Prussian generals and bureaucrats who, together with the Kaiser, control the policy of the country.

British readers who do not know Germany may think the foregoing indictment of German political incapacity severe. It is not so severe as Prince Buellow's. The portion of the late Imperial Chancellor's book which deals with domestic policy opens with these crushing sentences: "The history of our home policy, with the exception of a few bright spots, is a history of political mistakes. Despite the abundance of merits and great qualities with which the German nation is endowed, political talent has been denied it.... We are not a political people." A page or two later he goes even further and quotes with approval a dictum that the Germans are "political donkeys." That a modern statesman should think this of his fellow-countrymen is remarkable enough; that he should say it outright is a still more remarkable proof of his unshakeable belief in their submissiveness. Therein lies the whole tragedy of the present situation. The German people, so kindly and, alas! so docile, is suffering, not for its sins, but for its deficiencies; not for its own characteristic acts or natural ambitions, but for what it has too tamely allowed others, Prussian statesmen and soldiers, with alien ideals and an alien temper, to foist upon it, until it has become an integral part of its natural life and consciousness. Germany has been indoctrinated and Prussianised not only into acquiescence, but into sympathy with the policy of its rulers.

Sec.3. Prussia.—This brings us to the consideration of the second and more powerful of the two Germanies—namely, Prussia. In order to understand Prussia and the Prussian spirit we must plunge ourselves into an atmosphere wholly different from that of the Germany that has just been described. The very names of the two countries mark the measure of the difference. Germany means the country of the Germans, as England means the country of the English. But the name Prussia commemorates the subjugation and extinction by German conquerors and crusaders from the west of the Prussians or Bo-Russians, a tribe akin to the Letts and Lithuanians. The old Duchy of Prussia, which now forms the provinces of East and West Prussia at the extreme North-East of the present German Empire, consisted of heathen lands colonised or conquered, between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, by a great religious and military organisation known as the "Knights of the Teutonic Order." While Southern and Western Germany was passing, with the rest of Western Europe, through the transition between mediaeval and modern Europe, what is now North-Eastern Germany was still in a wholly primitive stage of development, and the Knights of the Teutonic Order, with crusading fervour, were spreading Christianity and German "culture" by force of arms, converting or repelling the Slavonic population and settling German colonists in the territory thus reclaimed for civilisation. The great British admirer of Prussia, Thomas Carlyle, in the first volume of his Frederick the Great, gives a vivid account of their activities in their forts or "burgs" of wood and stone, and helps us to realise what memories lie behind the struggle between German and Slav to-day, and why the word "Petersburg" has become so odious to the Russians as the name of their capital. "The Teutsch Ritters build a Burg for headquarters, spread themselves this way and that, and begin their great task. The Prussians were a fierce fighting people, fanatically anti-Christian: the Teutsch Ritters had a perilous never-resting time of it.... They built and burnt innumerable stockades for and against: built wooden Forts which are now stone Towns. They fought much and prevalently, galloped desperately to and fro, ever on the alert. How many Burgs of wood and stone they built in different parts, what revolts, surprisals, furious fights in woody, boggy places they had, no man counted; their life, read in Dryasdust's newest chaotic Books (which are of endless length, among other ill qualities) is like a dim nightmare of unintelligible marching and fighting: one feels as if the mere amount of galloping they had would have carried the Order several times round the Globe.... But always some preaching, by zealous monks, accompanies the chivalrous fighting. And colonists come in from Germany; trickling in, or at times streaming. Victorious Ritterdom offers terms to the beaten Heathen; terms not of tolerant nature, but which will be punctually kept by Ritterdom." Here we see the strange stern, medieval, crusading atmosphere which lies behind the unpleasant combinations, so familiar to us to-day in France and Belgium, of Uhlans and religion, of culture and violence, of "Germanisation" and devastation. When we hear the German professors of to-day preaching of the spread of German culture by the German arms, and when we feel disgust at the exaggerated religious phraseology which pervades the Kaiser's oratory and seems to accord so ill with his policy and ambitions, we must remember the peculiar origins of the Prussian State and how comparatively recent those origins are. "I have once before had occasion," said the Kaiser at Marienburg in East Prussia on June 5, 1902, "to say in this place how Marienburg, this unique Eastern bulwark, the point of departure for the culture of the lands east of the Vistula, will always be a symbol for our German mission. There is work for us again to-day. Polish arrogance wishes to lay hands on Germanism, and I am constrained to call my people to the defence of its national possessions. Here in Marienburg I proclaim that I expect all the brothers of the Order of St. John to be at my service when I call upon them to protect German ways and German customs." The Kaiser's crusading appeals are not hypocritical or consciously insincere: they are simply many centuries out of date—a grotesque medley of medieval romanticism and royal megalomania. What was possible for the warrior knights in North-East Germany five or six centuries ago is a tragic absurdity and an outrageous crime to-day among a spirited and sensitive people like the Poles—still more so in a highly civilised national State such as Belgium or France. It is an absurdity that only a theatrical monarch could conceive and a crime that only a military autocracy could attempt to enforce.

In the sixteenth century the Reformation, spreading throughout the North of Europe, undermined the basis of the Teutonic Order. The Grand Master of the time transformed himself into a Lutheran Prince holding the hereditary Duchy of Prussia as a vassal of the King of the neighbouring Slavonic State of Poland. In 1611 the Duchy was amalgamated with the territory of Brandenburg farther west, and in 1647 the enlarged Prussian territories won their emancipation from Poland. Prussia now became a distinct State, essentially German in character (as opposed to the Poles and Lithuanians on its Eastern border), but still remaining for a time outside the community of the other German States.

The union between Prussia and Brandenburg had brought Prussia under the rule of the House of Hohenzollern, which, although originally a South German family, had borne rule in Brandenburg since 1415. Under the Hohenzollerns Prussia rapidly increased in territory and influence until in 1701 the ruler of the day, the grandfather of Frederick the Great, took on himself the title of King. Under Frederick the Great, Prussia's career of conquest and aggrandisement continued. Seizing a convenient opportunity, he invaded and annexed the Austrian province of Silesia, and later joined with Austria and Russia in promoting the shameful Partition of Poland. The old conquering and "civilising" policy of the Teutonic Knights was continued, but under new conditions and in a brutal and cynical spirit which rendered it impossible of success. "The surest means of giving this oppressed nation better ideas and morals," wrote Frederick the Great, in words quoted with approval by Prince Buelow, "will always be gradually to get them to intermarry with Germans, even if at first it is only two or three of them in every village." This spirit in Prussian policy may have extinguished the ancient Prussians, but it has not yet begun to Germanise the Poles, and has gone far to de-Germanise the Alsatians. But it explains the utterances and justifies the sincerity of those who believe that to-day, as in the early days of her history, Prussia is fighting on behalf of "culture."

Prussia remains to-day, what she has been for the last two centuries, an aggressive military monarchy. "Prussia attained her greatness," says Prince Buelow, "as a country of soldiers and officials, and as such she was able to accomplish the work of German union; to this day she is still, in all essentials, a State of soldiers and officials." Power rests in the hands of the monarch and of a bureaucracy of military and civil officials, responsible to him alone, and traditionally and fanatically loyal to the monarch who is, before all things, their War Lord.

The Prussian outlook is so foreign to Western habits of thought that it is well that we should try to understand it at its best. Prussia proper has not been rich, like the rest of Germany, in poets and imaginative writers; but she is fortunate to-day in possessing in the greatest living Greek scholar, Professor von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, a man who by birth and breeding is able to put the highest interpretation upon the aims and spirit of the Prussian State. To Wilamowitz Prussia is not only nearer and dearer than Athens. She is better, and more advanced. At the close of a wonderful address on "the glory of the Athenian Empire," in which he has employed all the resources of his wide learning to paint a picture of Ancient Greece at her best, Wilamowitz breaks into this impassioned peroration: "But one element in life, the best of all, ye lacked, noble burghers of Athens. Your sages tell us of that highest love which, freed from all bodily entanglements, spends itself on institutions, on laws, on ideas. We Prussians, a rough, much-enduring tribe of Northerners, may be compacted of harder stuff; but we believe that love is on a higher level when the fullest devotion to an institution and an idea is inseparably linked with an entirely personal devotion to a human being; and at least we know how warm such a love can make a loyal heart. When our children have scarce learned to fold their hands before God, we set a picture before them, we teach them to recognise the noble features; we tell them, 'This is our good King.' Our young men, when they are of age to bear arms, look with joy and pride on the trim garb of war, and say, 'I go in the King's coat.' And when the nation assembles to a common political celebration, the occasion is no Feast of the Constitution, no Day of the Bastille, no Panathenaic Festival. It is then that we bow in reverence and loyalty before him who has allowed us to see with our own eyes that for which our Fathers dreamed and yearned, before him who ever extends the bounds of the Kingdom in Freedom, Prosperity, and Righteousness, before his Majesty the Emperor and King."[1]

[Footnote 1: Speeches and Lectures, 3rd edition, Berlin, 1913, p. 65. The "good King" referred to is the old Emperor William, as the address dates from 1877.]

Here, far better expressed than in the Kaiser's speeches, we see the spirit of the Prussian Junker at its best. It is narrow, old-fashioned, and, to democratic ears, almost grotesque. Yet, if it survives uncorrupted by the dangers to which progress always exposes a military caste, it will not be easy either to crush by defeat or to transform by humiliation.

It is among the old Prussian nobility and the large landed proprietors in the original Prussian provinces, who have come to be known as the "Junkers," that this spirit prevails. They stand for the old stern repressive military discipline and unchanging Conservatism in its extremest form, regarding with well-founded suspicion and misgiving symptoms of development in any direction whatsoever. No party in Germany acquiesced more unwillingly in the changes necessitated by her commercial and industrial development. Even their militarism stopped short at the Army, and it required a substantial increase in the protective tariff safeguarding their agricultural interests to purchase their reluctant adhesion to the Kaiser's policy of naval expansion. Even now the German Navy, the pride of the commercial and industrial classes throughout the German Empire, is regarded by them with uneasy suspicion as a parvenu service, in which the old Prussian influences count for less in promotion than technical skill and practical efficiency.

The institutions of the Prussian State represent the spirit of its ruling caste. If the German Empire is not democratic, Prussia lags far behind it. The electoral system in use for the Prussian Lower House is too complicated to explain here. Its injustice may be gauged from the fact that in 1900 the Social Democrats, who actually polled a majority of the votes, secured seven seats out of nearly 400. The whole spirit and practice of the Government is inimical to inborn British conceptions of civil liberty and personal rights. There is one law and code of conduct for officers and another for civilians, and woe betide the civilian who resists the military pretensions. The incidents at Zabern in Alsace in 1913 are still fresh in public memory, reinforced by evidence of a similar spirit in German military proclamations in France and Belgium. But it is important to realise that these incidents are not exceptional outbursts but common Prussian practice, upheld, as the sequel to the Zabern events proved, by the highest authority.

Prussia, and through Prussia Germany, is in effect ruled in accordance with the wishes of the official caste: and short of a popular rising nothing but defeat can dethrone it. "Any one who has any familiarity at all with our officers and generals," says an authoritative German writer, in words that we may hope will be prophetic, "knows that it would take another Sedan, inflicted on us instead of by us, before they would acquiesce in the control of the Army by the German Parliament."[1] No clearer statement could be given as to where the real power lies in Germany, and how stern will be the task of displacing it.

[Footnote 1: Professor Delbrueck (who succeeded to the chair of history in Berlin held so long by Treitschke), in a book published early in 1914 (Government and the Popular Will, p. 136).]

The foreign policy of Prussia has reflected the same domineering spirit. Its object has been the increase of its power and territory by conquest or cunning: and by the successful prosecution of this policy it has extended Prussian authority and Prussian influence over a large part of Western Germany. The best way of illustrating this will be to quote a passage from the Recollections of Prince Bismarck, who directed Prussian policy from 1862 to 1890. In 1864 trouble arose as to the succession to the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein on the Danish border. Prussia had no claim whatever to the Duchies; but she coveted Holstein because it would give her a Western sea-board, with the results that we all know. Bismarck describes the arguments which he used to persuade his Royal Master to assert his claim. "I reminded him," he writes, "that each of his immediate predecessors had won an addition to the Monarchy": he then went through the history of the six previous reigns, and ended by encouraging King William to be worthy of his ancestors. His advice, as we have seen, was successfully adopted.



The conquest of France in 1870, by means of the military power of Germany under Prussian leadership, made Prussia supreme in Germany, and the German army supreme in Central Europe. The Treaty of Frankfurt in May 1871, by which the new French Republic ceded to the German Empire the two French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, marked the opening of a new epoch in European history, the period of the Armed Peace, which ended in 1914. It marked also the opening of a new epoch in Germany, some features of which we must now examine.

Sec.4. Germany since 1870.—German history from 1871 to 1914 falls into two well-defined periods. During the first period, from 1871 to 1888, Germany was ruled by her Imperial Chancellor, Prince Bismarck. But the accession of the present Kaiser led to a change, not in the letter, but in the spirit of the new constitution, and since 1890, when William II. "dropped the pilot" and selected a more amenable successor, the real control of policy has lain with the Emperor.

The relations between Prince Bismarck and the old Emperor, who was over ninety when he died in 1888, form a touching passage in modern history. Although his grandson has publicly claimed for him a peculiar measure of divine inspiration, his strength lay in his implicit confidence in his great minister. Bismarck's attitude to him, as described in his Memoirs, is rather like that of an old family retainer who has earned by long and faithful service the right to assert his views and to pit his judgment against his master's. His one formidable antagonist was the Empress; and long experience, he tells us, enabled him to judge whether difficulties in persuading the old Kaiser to adopt a given line of policy were due to his own judgment or conceived "in the interests of domestic peace." The faithful servant had his own appropriate methods of winning his way in either case.

But with the new Kaiser the old minister's astuteness availed nothing, and the story of Bismarck's curt dismissal, after thirty-eight years of continuous service, from the post which he had created for himself, illustrates the danger of framing a constitution to meet a particular temporary situation. Bismarck, put out of action by his own machinery, retired growling to his country seat, and lived to see the reversal of his foreign policy and the exposure of Germany, through the Franco-Russian Alliance, to the one danger he always dreaded, an attack on both flanks.

Like Germany's present rulers, Bismarck was not a scrupulous man; but unlike them he was shrewd and far-sighted, and understood the statesmen and the peoples with whom he had to deal. The main object of his foreign policy was to preserve the prestige of the German army as the chief instrument of power in Central Europe, and to allow the new Germany, after three wars in seven years, time to develop in peace and to consolidate her position as one of the Great Powers.

The situation was not an easy one; for Germany's rapid rise to power, and the methods by which she had acquired it, had not made her popular. Bismarck's foreign policy was defensive throughout, and he pursued it along two lines. He sought to strengthen Germany by alliances, and to weaken her rivals by embroiling them with one another. The great fruit of his policy was the formation, completed in 1882, of the Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy.

There was nothing sentimental about the Triple Alliance. The Italians hate the Austrians, whom they drove out of Venice as recently as 1866, while neither the German Austrians nor the other races in the Dual Monarchy have any love lost for the Prussians. But Bismarck decided that this combination was the safest in Germany's interest: so he set to work to play upon Austria's fear of Russia, and to embroil Italy with France in North Africa; and his manoeuvres were duly rewarded.

But this was not sufficient. Faced with the implacable hostility of France, on account of the lost provinces, Bismarck saw danger of trouble from a French Coalition with the two remaining Great Powers, Britain and Russia. Bismarck never liked England; but he never made his successors' mistake of despising her. He cultivated good relations, but he rejected the idea of an alliance, because, as he said, "the English constitution is not compatible with treaties of assured continuity." In other words, he fought shy of British democracy, which he felt to be an incalculable factor. This threw him back upon Russia.

The relations between the German and the Russian peoples have never been cordial. But between the reactionary bureaucracies of the Prussian and Russian governments there was a strong bond of mutual interest, which Bismarck exploited to the full. Both had popular movements to hold in check, both had stolen goods to guard in the shape of their Polish possessions, and both had an interest in the preservation of reactionary institutions. The influence of Prussia upon Russia, and of the efficient, highly-organised, relentless Prussian machine upon the arbitrary, tyrannical, but far less efficient and inhuman bureaucracy of Russia, has been wholly sinister[1], both for Russia and for Europe. Bismarck's object, of course, was not so much to keep down the Russian revolutionaries as to check the aspirations of the Panslavists, whose designs for the liberation of the Slav nationalities, as we now see them unfolding, threaten the stability both of Prussia and of Austria-Hungary.

[Footnote 1: The same remark applies to the influence of Germany on Turkey.]

Throughout the 'eighties Bismarck succeeded in keeping on foot a secret understanding with Russia. How deeply he had implanted the necessity of this policy in the mind of William I. is brought home by the fact that it was the thought uppermost in the old man's mind as he lay on his deathbed. "Never lose touch with the Tsar," whispered the old man to his grandson, when he was almost too weak to speak. "There is no cause for quarrel."

The old Emperor died in 1888. In 1890 the young Emperor "dropped the pilot." In the same year Russia refused to renew her secret treaty. In 1891 the first Franco-Russian Treaty was signed, and the diplomatic supremacy of Europe passed from the Triple Alliance to be shared between the two opposing groups with which we have been familiar in recent years.

The disappearance of Prince Bismarck marked the beginning of a new phase in German policy and in German life. The younger generation, which had come to maturity, like the Kaiser, since 1870, had never known the old divided Germany, or realised the difficulties of her statesmen. Every one wondered what use the young Kaiser would make of the great Army bequeathed to him. He was believed to be a firebrand. Few believed that, imbued with Prussian traditions, he would keep the peace for twenty-five years; fewer still that, when he broke it, Germany would have the second Navy in the world.

But we are not now concerned with the baffling personality of the Kaiser himself. What is important for us here is the general attitude of mind among the German public of the Kaiser's generation, which has rendered possible the prosecution of the cherished ideas of their ruler.

The school of thought which has been steadily gaining force, under official encouragement, during the last twenty-five years is best summed up in the popular watchwords, "Germany's place in the sun" and "World-Policy" (Weltpolitik). These phrases embody, for Germans, who always tend to be abstract in their thinking, not only a practical policy, but a philosophy of human society and government.

This is not the place in which to analyse in detail the outlook upon life (Weltanschauung) of the man in the street in modern Germany. It is a confused and patchwork philosophy, drawn, consciously or unconsciously, from many quarters—from the old cosmopolitan tradition of German culture, dating from Goethe and Leasing; from the brave and arrogant claims of Fichte and the prophets and poets of the Napoleonic era; from the far-reaching influence of Hegel and his idealisation of the Prussian State; from the reaction to "realism" in politics after 1848; from the prestige of Bismarck and the deep impression made by the apparent success of his methods and principles; from the gifted Prussian historians, Treitschke and Sybel, who set their own interpretation upon Bismarck's work and imprinted it, by speech and pen, upon the mind of the German nation; and from a hasty interpretation of the theories of writers like Nietzsche and Thomas Carlyle, with their exaltation of "heroes" and "supermen," their encouragements to "live dangerously," their admiration for will-power as against reason and feeling, and their tirades against legal shams, "ballot-box democracy," and flabby humanitarianism.

The practical object of the policy of Weltpolitik can be simply stated. It is to extend to the other continents, and to the world as a whole, the power and the prestige secured for Germany in Europe by the work of Bismarck. "When Germany had won a mighty position on a level with the older Great Powers," says Prince Buelow, "the path of international politics lay open to her ... In the Emperor William II. the nation found a clear-sighted, strong-willed guide who led them along the new road."

Some such expansion of German influence was inevitable from the facts of her economic development since 1871. The population of the Empire, which in 1871 was 41,000,000, has now risen to 65,000,000. The resources of the country, the neglect of which during the days of disunion had forced so many Germans to emigrate for a livelihood, have been rapidly and scientifically developed. Already in the 'eighties "Made in Germany" had become a familiar talisman, and, before the outbreak of the present war, Germany ranked with the United States as the second greatest commercial power in the world.

Simultaneously, of course, there has been a great change in the distribution of the population. In the year 1850 65 per cent, and in 1870 47 per cent of the working population were engaged in agriculture. By 1912 the proportion had sunk to 28.6 per cent.

It was inevitable also that Germany should share with the other Great Powers in the work of colonial government. The adjustment of the relations between the advanced and backward races of mankind is the greatest political task of our age; it is a responsibility shared jointly between all the civilised States, and when in the 'eighties and 'nineties the vast regions of Africa were partitioned amongst them, Germany, late in the field, asserted her claims and received her share in the responsibility.

Rapid economic development and a colonial empire—what was there in these to cause hostility between Germany and Great Britain? The United States have passed through a similar development and have accepted a similar extension of responsibility far outside their own continent. America is a great, a growing, and a self-respecting Power; yet Americans see no ground for that inevitable conflict of interests between their country and Great Britain which forms the theme of so many German books, from Prince Buelow's candid self-revelations down to less responsible writers like Bernhardi.

The explanation lies in the nature of German thought and ambitions. When Germans speak of "a place in the sun," they are not thinking of the spread of German trade, the success of German adventure or enterprise, or of the achievements of Germans in distant lands. They are thinking of the extension of the German State. British influence beyond the seas has been built up during the last four centuries by the character and achievements of British pioneers. Downing Street has seldom helped, often hindered, and generally only ratified the accomplished facts of British settlement and influence. That is not the Prussian theory or the Prussian method. It is for the State to win the territory, and then to set the people to work there, on lines laid down from above. The individual Englishman, when he goes out to colonise, carries England with him, as a part of his personality. Not so the German, at least on the Prussian theory. "The rare case supervened," says Prince Buelow,[1] of an instance typical of the building up of the British Empire, "that the establishment of State rule followed and did not precede the tasks of colonising and civilisation." The State itself, on this theory, has a civilising mission of expansion towards which it directs the activities of its citizens.

[Footnote 1: Imperial Germany, 1st ed., p. 249.]

Under the influence of ideas such as these, Germany, since the accession of William II., has built a Navy second to that of Great Britain alone.

What was the purpose of the building of the German Navy? The German official answer is that its purpose was the protection of German trade. "We are now vulnerable at sea," says Prince Buelow. "We have entrusted millions to the ocean, and with these millions, the weal and woe of many of our countrymen. If we had not in good time provided protection for them ... we should have been exposed to the danger of having one day to look on defencelessly while we were deprived of them. We should have been placed in the position of being unable to employ and support a considerable number of our millions of inhabitants at home. The result would have been an economic crisis which might easily attain the proportions of a national catastrophe."

These words may yet prove prophetic. But the catastrophe will not be the result of Germany's lack of a Navy; it will be the result of challenging the naval supremacy of Great Britain.

Prince Buelow's argument assumes, as a basis, the hostility of Great Britain. This assumption, as we know, was unjustified; and its persistence in the German mind can only be set down to an uneasy conscience. The hard fact of the matter is that it is impossible for Germany or for any other Power successfully to defend her foreign trade in case of war with Great Britain. No other Power thinks it necessary to attempt to do so, for no other Power has reason to desire or to foresee a naval conflict with Great Britain.

Ever since 1493, when the Pope divided the monopoly of traffic on the ocean between Spain and Portugal, and English mariners flouted his edict, Great Britain has stood for the policy of the Open Sea, and there is no likelihood of our abandoning it. The German official theory of the purpose of their Navy, with its suspicious attitude towards British sea-power, was, in effect, a bid for supremacy, inspired by the same ideas which made the German army, under Bismarck, supreme in Central Europe. The Kaiser's speeches on naval matters, notably his famous declaration that "our future is on the water," provide an official confirmation, if one were needed, of the real nature of Germany's naval ambitions.

But what right, it may be asked, has Great Britain to this naval supremacy? Why should we, more than any other Power, claim one of the elements for our own? Has not Germany some reason to be jealous? Why should we not allow her, together with ourselves, "a place on the Ocean"?

The answer to this lies in the character of the British Empire. One quarter of the human race live under the Union Jack, scattered throughout the oceans and controlled from a small island in the Western seas. For Great Britain, alone among the States of the world, naval supremacy, and nothing less, is a daily and hourly necessity. India realised this truth recently in a flash when, after generations of silent protection by British sea-power, German shells fell one night at Madras. Any Power that challenges the naval supremacy of Great Britain is quarrelling, not with the British Government or the British people, but with the facts of history, of geography, and of the political evolution of the world. The British Empire has not been built up, like the German, by the work of statesmen and thinkers; it is not the result, as Germans think, of far-seeing national policy or persistent ambition and "greed." It has slowly taken shape, during the last four centuries, since intercourse was opened up by sea between the different races of mankind, in accordance with the needs of the world as a whole. Its collapse, at the hands of Germany or any other Power, would not mean the substitution of a non-British Empire for a British. It would inaugurate a period of chaos in all five continents of the world.

The rulers and people of Germany, who counted on the "decadence" of Great Britain and the disintegration of her unorganised Empire, did not realise these simple facts. Their lack of perception was due partly to their political inexperience; but a deeper reason for it lies in their wholly false estimate as to what "world-policy" and "world-empire" mean. Trained in the Prussian school, they thought of them, like soldiers, in terms of conquest, glory, and prestige. That way lies Napoleonism. None of the great Powers is wholly free from blame on this score. But until Germans realise, as the other Powers are slowly realising, that the true basis of Empire is not a love of glory but a sense of responsibility towards backward peoples, it will be hard to readmit them into the comity of the Great Powers. Only a sense of common purposes and ideals, and of joint responsibility for world-problems, can make the Concert of Europe a reality.

Such is the general attitude of mind among the German public of the younger generation. Let us now turn to the effect of this new outlook upon the political parties and groupings.

The chief result has been the extinction in Germany, as a political force, of the great liberal movement of the mid-nineteenth century which in England, France, and other Western countries has grown and developed during the last generation along lines corresponding to the needs of the new century. The younger generation of middle-class Germans, indoctrinated with "orthodox" and "national" opinions at school and on military service, eschew the ideals which attracted their fathers and grandfathers in 1848; and, although so-called "liberal," "free-thinking," and Radical parties still exist, they have steadily been growing more militarist. Militarism in its new guise, bound up with ideas of industrial and commercial expansion, is far more attractive to them than in the form of the Prussian Army. The Emperor's Navy Bills were from the first more popular in commercial and industrial circles than with the old Prussian Conservatives. But as the years went on the Kaiser succeeded in converting both the Junkers to his Navy Bills and the middle classes to his Army Bills, so that by 1913, when he demanded the "great national sacrifice" of a levy of 50 million pounds by a tax, not on income, but on property, there was no difficulty whatever about "managing" the Reichstag. "The Army Bill of 1913," says Prince Buelow, "met with such a willing reception from all parties as had never been accorded to any requisition for armaments on land and sea.... So far as man can tell, every necessary and justifiable Army and Navy Bill will always be able to count on a safe Parliamentary majority."[1]

[Footnote 1: Imperial Germany, p. 169.]

Prince Buelow's "safe Parliamentary majority" means, of course, a majority sufficient to outvote the Social Democrats, with whom every German Government has to reckon as a permanent opposition.

So far we have left the Social Democrats out of the picture. It was necessary to do this, in discussing German policy and the relation between the German Government and Reichstag opinion; for the German Government itself habitually leaves them out of the picture. Hitherto in Germany, so far as opinion on political questions has mattered at all, it is upper-and middle-class opinion that has counted, as it counted in England up to fifty years ago. To the German Government and to the ordinary educated German the Social Democratic party, though it numbers in its voting ranks over 4 million German workmen and others, does not represent German opinion at all: it represents something un-German and anti-German—a public enemy. Between the Social Democrats and the rest of society a great gulf is fixed, across which no intercourse is possible: as the pioneers who attempted to introduce the Workers' Educational Association into Germany found, such intercourse is forbidden from either direction. The Social Democrats are the "Red Danger," "men who," in the Kaiser's words, are "the enemies of Empire and Fatherland," and "unworthy" (except, of course, in war-time) "to bear the name of Germans." We must go back a hundred years in English history to realise the depth of the animosity between the Social Democratic party and the rest of German society. "The word Radical," says an English historian, "conveyed a very different meaning in 1816 to what it does now.... The hands of the Radicals were supposed to be against every man, and every man's hand was against them. Scott, when he talks of rebels in arms, always styles them Radicals. 'Radicalism is a spirit,' wrote the Vicar of Harrow in 1820, 'of which the first elements are a rejection of Scripture, and a contempt of all the institutions of your country, and of which the results, unless averted by a merciful Providence, must be anarchy, atheism, and universal ruin.'"[1] The Vicar of Harrow in 1820 very fairly sums up the substance of innumerable German speeches, pamphlets, and election addresses in 1912 on the subject of the Social Democrats.

[Footnote 1: Spencer Walpole, History of England, vol. i. p. 348.]

How is this extraordinary position maintained? How is it possible that in a modern, largely industrial community, the representatives of working-class opinion should be regarded as public enemies?

The chief reason lies, of course, in the fact that the German Empire is not a democracy and is not governed by ministers responsible to Parliament. The immense numbers and rapid growth of the Social Democrats have therefore not really been a menace to the Government. In fact, it has even been held in some quarters that it has been to the interest of the German Government, which is based on the Prussian military caste, to manoeuvre the Social Democrats into an extreme position and then to hold them up as a terrible example of what democracy means. "This," they can tell the German people, "is the alternative to Prussian rule." A dangerous policy, it may be argued, for the Social Democrats may some day secure a majority in the Reichstag. The Prussian answer to this is that, without a redistribution of seats, this is barely conceivable; and that, were it to take place, the Reichstag would promptly be dissolved for new elections on a narrower franchise. Bismarck himself contemplated this course, and his successors would not shrink from it.

Another reason why it has been possible for the Government to ignore the Social Democrats has been the absence of a practical alternative programme on the part of the Social Democrats themselves. "If I had to make out a school report for the Social Democratic Movement," said Prince Buelow in the Reichstag on one occasion, "I should say, 'Criticism, agitation, discipline, and self-sacrifice, I. a; positive achievements, lucidity of programme, V. b.'" The taunt is not undeserved. The Socialist Movement in Germany has suffered, like so many German movements, through a rigid adherence to logical theories. Under the leadership of old revolutionary thinkers like Bebel it has failed to adapt itself to the facts of modern German life. The vague phrases of its republican programme, survivals from a past epoch of European thought, have attracted to it a large mass of inarticulate discontent which it has never been able to weld into a party of practical reformers. In the municipal sphere and in the field of Trade Unionism, under the education of responsibility, German Socialism can show great achievements; but in national policy it has been as helpless as the rest of the German nation.

What effect, it will be asked, is the war of 1914 likely to have on the German working-class movement? In 1848 middle-class Germany made its stand for democracy. May we hope for a similar and more successful movement, in the direction of Western ideals and methods of government, from working-class Germany as a result of 1914?

It is a tempting prophecy; but the outlook is not propitious. Germany, Prussian and South German, noble, bourgeois, and working class, has rallied round the Emperor in this crisis of national history, as the brutal and cynical directors of German policy calculated that she would. For the Social Democratic Movement the war comes with a peculiar appeal. It is a war against Russia, a country about which the German workman knows little and understands less, but which he considers to be the home of a reaction far blacker than that of his own country. A war of aggression against the Western Powers would have found the Social Democrats divided. By representing Russia as the aggressor and the Western Powers as the shameless allies of the "Mongol," German diplomacy, more successful within than without, made certain of enlisting Socialist support.

Moreover, the Socialists too have to pass through a natural reaction from their refusal to recognise the forces of Nationality—from Utopian dreams of international action by the peoples across the barriers of separate governments. For the first time in the history of the party, German Socialism has been allowed to be patriotic. It is an exhilarating and heartening experience, and it is certain to leave an indelible mark upon the spirit of the movement. The great party organisation, hitherto confined to the sterile work of agitation, is being used to cope with the many problems created by the war; and this work, rather than revolutionary agitation, is likely to occupy it for some time to come.

A veil has fallen upon Germany: German books and papers are stopped at our ports: we cannot know through what thoughts the German nation is passing. But as we look with the mind's eye across the North Sea, past devastated Belgium to the populous towns of industrial Germany, we see a people skilful, highly instructed, and mechanically intelligent, yet equally devoid either of personal initiative or of great and inspiring leadership. Two generations of Prussian education have left German public life practically empty of names of more than local reputation. Great changes are needed—a change of institutions and a change of spirit; yet whence this will come we cannot divine. Only, as democrats, we can say with confidence that if the true spirit of the German people is to be liberated from its long imprisonment, its freedom must be won, not from without, but from within. Not Europe but only the Germans can make Germany herself again.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS

1. GERMAN HISTORY

BRYCE. Holy Roman Empire. (Deals with mediaeval Germany, but also contains a most interesting final chapter on Germany in the Nineteenth Century, written in 1873.) 1904. (7s. 6d.)

CARLYLE. Frederick the Great, vol. i. (Best account in English of the earlier history of Prussia.) (2s. 6d.)

H.A.L. FISHER. Napoleonic Statesmanship: Germany. 1903. (12s. 6d.) (Germany in the Napoleonic era.)

SEELEY. Life of Stein. 1878. 3 vols. (30s.) (The standard work in English on reorganisation of Prussia after Napoleon.)

BISMARCK. Reflections and Reminiscences. (The guiding mind in Germany, 1862-1888.) 2 vols. 1898. (Can only be bought second-hand.)

HEADLAM. Life of Bismarck. 1899. (6s.) (Heroes of the Nations.)

HOLLAND. Germany to the Present Day. 1913. (2s. net.) A useful short history if supplemented by other books.

POWICKE. Bismarck. 1914. (6d.) (People's Books.) (Excellent.) The two great modern German historians are Treitschke and Sybel, for whom see Gooch's History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 140-53. Treitschke's history is not available in English: Sybel's has been translated under the title, The Founding of the German Empire by William I. vols., New York, 1890-1891.

2. GERMANY UNDER WILLIAM II.

BUeLOW. Imperial Germany. 1914. (2s. net.) (The mind of the German Government.)

SAUNDERS. The Last of the Huns. 1914. (1s. net.) (In spite of its objectionable title this volume, by the late correspondent of the Times in Berlin, is written with fairness and lucidity, and contains much valuable information.)

HENRI LICHTENBERGER. Germany and its Evolution in Modern Times. 1913. (10s. 6d net.) (Translated from the French: suggestive, especially on economic questions and on the movements of German thought.)

W.H. DAWSON. The Evolution of Modern Germany. 1908. (5s. net.) (The best general account of modern Germany in English.)

C. TOWER. Germany of To-day. 1913. Home University Library. (Is.) (Good.)

C. SAROLEA. The Anglo-German Problem. (2s.) (A useful popular account of German political conditions and German policy.)

Board of Education Special Reports, vols. iii. and ix. (3s. 3d. and 2s. 7d.) Articles by Dr. M.E. Sadler on German Education.

Memoirs of Prince Hohenlohe. (Imperial Chancellor, 1894-1900.) 2 vols. 1906. (24s. net.)

The Britannica War Books. Germany. (2s. 6d. net.) By W. Alison Phillips and J.W. Headlam. (A somewhat carelessly abridged reprint from the standard article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.)

3. GENERAL BOOKS

H.S. CHAMBERLAIN. The foundations of the Nineteenth Century. English translation. 2 vols. 1910. (25s. net.) (This book had an immense vogue in Germany, and was particularly recommended by the Kaiser to his subjects. It is full of interesting, if ill-founded, generalisations tending to emphasise the importance of Race and to glorify the German race.)

THOMAS. German Literature. (6s.)

ROBERTSON. German Literature. 1914. Home University Library. (1s.)

HERFORD AND OTHERS. Germany in the Nineteenth Century. Manchester. 1912. (2s. 6d.) Essays on different aspects of German development.

BERNHARDT. Germany and the Next War. 1912. (2s. net.) (The philosophy and aims of Gorman militarism worked out.)

CRAMB. Germany and England. 1914. (2s. 6d. net.) (An account of Treitschke and his school of thought: interesting for the light it throws on German misconceptions about Great Britain.)

TREITSCHKE. Selections from his Lectures on Politics. 1914.

Translated by A.L. Gowans. (2s. net.)

The writings of the following German professors will be found interesting if procurable: Oncken, Meinecke (both contributors to the Cambridge Modern History), Delbrueck, Sombart, Erich Marcks (see his lectures on Germany in Lectures on the History of the Nineteenth Century, edited by Kirkpatrick, Cambridge, 1900, 4s. 6d.), Schiemann, Lamprecht, Schmoller, and F. von Liszt.

Note.—Such considered German writings as have come to hand since the outbreak of the war show little tendency to cope with the real facts of the situation, or even to seek to understand them. They seem to indicate two developments in German opinion.

(1) A great consolidation of German national unity (except, of course, in Poland and Alsace-Lorraine).

(2) A tendency to forgo the consideration of the immediate issues and to hark back in thought to 1870 or even to the Wars of Liberation. It is difficult to judge of a nation in arms from the writings of its stay-at-homes; but no one can read recent articles by the leaders of German thought without feeling that the Germans are still, before all things and incurably, "the people of poets and philosophers," and that, by a tragic irony, it is the best and most characteristic qualities of the race which are sustaining and will continue to sustain it in the conflict in which its dreams have involved it.



CHAPTER IV

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY AND THE SOUTHERN SLAVS

"For a century past attempts have been made to solve the Eastern Question. On the day when it appears to have been solved Europe will inevitably be confronted by the Austrian Question."—ALBERT SOREL (1902).

In April 1909, a week after the international crisis evoked by Austria's annexation of Bosnia had come to an end, I paid my first visit to Cetinje, the tiny mountain-capital of Montenegro, and was assured by the Premier, Dr. Tomanovi, that the conflict had merely been postponed, not averted—a fact which even then was obvious enough. "But remember," he said, "it is a question of Aut aut (either, or)—either Serbia and Montenegro or Austria-Hungary. One or other has got to go, and you may rest assured that in four, or at most five, years from now there will be a European war over this very question." At the time I merely regarded his prophecy as a proof of Serb megalomania, but it has been literally fulfilled.

In 1908-1909 Austria-Hungary, with the aid of her German ally, enforced her wishes in respect of Bosnia upon a reluctant Europe; but instead of following up this success by a determined effort to solve the Southern Slav question on an Austrian basis, she allowed the confusion to grow yearly worse confounded, and gradually created an intolerable situation from which a peaceful exit was well-nigh impossible. The actual event which precipitated the struggle, the event from which the diplomatic contest of last July, and thus the great war, first proceeded, was the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo on June 28 and the consequent acute friction between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. But the murder, as will be shown later, was merely made the pretext for Austria's declaration of war. The real causes lie far deeper, and can only be properly understood on the basis of an historical survey.

My apology for inflicting so many unfamiliar details upon the reader is that the key to the whole situation lies in Austria-Hungary, and that upon the fate of its provinces and races in this war depends to a very great extent the question whether the new Europe which is to issue from this fiery ordeal is to be better than the old Europe which is crumbling in ruins before our eyes. For the moment a thick fog of war obscures this point of view; but the time will assuredly come when it will emerge in its true perspective.

In recent years it had become a cheap journalistic commonplace to refer to the coming "inevitable" struggle between Teuton and Slav, and the present war is no doubt widely regarded as proving the correctness of this theory, despite the fact that the two chief groups of Teutons are ranged on opposite sides, and that the Slavs enjoy the active support of Celts and Latins also. That such a struggle has come, is in the last resort due to the false conceptions of Nationality which underly the policy of the two central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. The freedom from foreign oppression which the Germans so nobly vindicated against Napoleon has not been extended to their own subject races, the Poles, Danes, and Lorrainers; and recent years have seen the accentuation of a conflict the germs of which may be detected as far back as the fatal crime of the Polish Partition in the eighteenth century. The policy of Germanisation in Austria has been gradually undermined by causes which it would take too long to enumerate, but its sting has survived in the maintenance of a foreign policy which treats 26,000,000 Slavs as a mere annexe of militant Germanism and as "gun-fodder" for the designs of Berlin; while in Hungary the parallel policy of Magyarisation has increased in violence from year to year, poisoning the wells of public opinion, creating a gulf of hatred between the Magyars and their subject races (the Slovaks, Roumanians, Croats, Serbs, etc.), and rendering cordial relations with the neighbouring Balkan States impossible. Nor is it a mere accident that official Germany and official Hungary should have pursued an actively Turcophil policy; for the same tendencies have been noticeable in Turkey, though naturally in a somewhat cruder form than farther west. Just as the Young Turk policy of Turkification rendered a war between Turkey and the Balkan States inevitable, so the policy of Magyarisation pursued by two generations of Hungarian statesmen sowed the seeds of war between Austria and the Southern Slavs. In the former case it was possible to isolate the conflict, in the latter it has involved the greater part of Europe in a common disaster.

The struggle centres round the Austro-Serbian dispute. Let us then attempt a brief survey of the two countries.

Sec.1. Austria and the Habsburgs.—Let us begin with Austria-Hungary. In this country many misconceptions prevail regarding Austria-Hungary; nor is this surprising, for it is unique among States, and whether we regard it from a political, a constitutional, a racial, or a social point of view, the issues are equally complicated and difficult to sum up. With the aid of a good gazetteer it is easy enough to elicit the facts that the Austria-Hungary of to-day is a state of fifty-two million inhabitants, divided into three component parts: (a) the Empire of Austria, (b) the Kingdom of Hungary, each with subdivisions which will be referred to later, and (c) the annexed provinces of Bosnia-Herzegovina, jointly administered by the two Governments. But this bald fact is meaningless except in connection with the historical genesis of the Habsburg State.



Austria—Oesterreich—is the ancient Eastmark or frontier province, the outpost of Carlovingian power against the tribes of the east, then of the mediaeval German Empire against Slav and Magyar. Under the House of Habsburg, which first rose to greatness on the ruins of a Greater Bohemia, Austria grew steadily stronger as a distinct unit. Two famous mottoes sum up the policy of that dynasty in the earlier centuries of its existence. Austriae est Imperare Orbi Universo (Austria's it is to Rule the Universe) ran the device of that canny Frederick III., who, amid much adversity, laid the plans which prompted an equally striking epigram about his son and successor Maximilian, the "Last of the Knights"—Bella gerant alii, tu, felix Austria, nube (Let others wage war; do thou marry, O fortunate Austria!). There were three great stages in Habsburg marriage policy. In 1479 Maximilian married the heiress of Charles the Bold, thus acquiring the priceless dowry of the Low Countries (what are now Belgium and Holland). In 1506 his son Philip added the crown of Spain and the Indies by his marriage with the heiress of Ferdinand and Isabella. In 1526, when the battle of Mohacs placed Hungary at the mercy of the Turks, Maximilian's grandson Ferdinand, in his wife's name, united Bohemia, Hungary, and Croatia with the Austrian duchies.

Henceforth for over two centuries Austria and Habsburg became the bulwark of Christendom against the Turks; though delayed by wars of religion and by the excesses of religious bigotry, they yet never lost sight of the final goal. Twice—at the beginning and at the end of this period, in 1527 and 1683—the Turks were before the very walls of Vienna, but the second of these occasions represents their final effort. In the closing years of the seventeenth and the first two decades of the eighteenth centuries the tide finally rolled back against them. Foremost among the victors stands out the great name of Prince Eugene, comrade-in-arms of our own Marlborough, whose song, "Prinz Eugen, der edle Ritter" (Prince Eugene, the noble Knight), has been sung in July and August 1914 on the streets of Vienna, just as "Marlbrook s'en va-t-en guerre" might be sung by our Belgian allies. The peace of 1718 represents Habsburg's farthest advance southwards; Belgrade and half of present-day Serbia owned allegiance to Vienna. Then came the check of 1739, when these conquests were restored to the Sultan. Due merely to incompetent generals, it need not have been permanent, had not Frederick the Great created a diversion from the north. By the time that the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years' War were over, that expansion southwards which had seemed so certain was irrevocably postponed. The organisation of fresh "Military Frontiers," the colonisation of waste lands in South Hungary—all was admirable so far as it went, but was already a defensive rather than an offensive measure. Meanwhile a formidable rival appeared in the shape of the Russian colossus, and the history of two centuries is dominated by Austro-Russian rivalry in the Balkans. Here we are confronted by the first of those lost opportunities in which the history of modern Austria is unhappily so rich.

During the eighteenth century Austria became, as it were, the chief home of bureaucratic government, first under Maria Theresa, one of the greatest women-sovereigns, then under her son Joseph II. A series of "enlightened experiments" in government, typical of the age of Voltaire and of Frederick, and honestly conducted for the people, though never by the people, ended as such experiments are apt to end, in failure. The most that can be said is that the bureaucratic machine had become more firmly fixed in the groove which it was henceforth to occupy.

The failure of Joseph II. was above all due to his inability to recognise the meaning of Nationality, to his attempt to apply Germanisation as the one infallible remedy for all internal difficulties in his dominions. The idea of Nationality, already gaining strength, obtained a fresh impetus from the French Revolution. While in the west it sowed the seeds of United Italy and United Germany, which the nineteenth century was to bring to fruition, in the Balkans it stirred waters which had seemed dead for centuries, and led to the uprising of the Serbs and Greeks, then of the Roumanians, and finally a generation later of the Bulgarians. In the Habsburg dominions the same movement revealed itself in the revival of national feeling in Hungary, Bohemia, and Croatia, but nowhere more strongly than in Hungary, where it was accompanied by a remarkable literary revival and the appearance of a group of Magyar poets of real genius.

The Kingdom of Hungary, which from 1526 to 1687 had been partially under Turkish rule, led a vegetable existence during the eighteenth century. This lull was a necessary period of recuperation after exhausting wars. The ancient Hungarian constitution, dating in its essentials from the thirteenth century, but fallen on evil days during the Turkish era, now came more and more out of abeyance. Its fundamental principles were reaffirmed by the famous laws of Leopold II. (1790-92), and after a further relapse due to the Napoleonic wars, a long series of constitutional and linguistic reforms were introduced by successive parliaments between 1825 and 1848.

Without entering into a discussion of the Hungarian constitution, it is well to point out one factor which lies at the root of all political and constitutional development in Hungary and explains the Magyar outlook for centuries past, even up to the present day. Till 1840 Latin was the official language of the country, and in that Latin the term for the political nation was Populus, which we would naturally translate as people. But populus contrasted in Hungarian law with plebs, the misera plebs contribuens, that phrase of ominous meaning to describe the mass of the oppressed and unenfranchised people, the populus being the nobles, a caste which was relatively very wide, but none the less a caste, and which enjoyed a monopoly of all political power. Till 1848 only the populus could vote, only the plebs could pay taxes—a delightful application of the principle, "Heads I win, tails you lose!" In 1848 the distinction was broken down in theory, the franchise being extended beyond the privileged class by the initiative of that class itself. But in effect the distinction has survived to the present day in a veiled form. Political power, and, above all, the parliamentary franchise and the county elective bodies, continued to be a monopoly—henceforth a monopoly of the Magyar nobility, plus those classes whom they had assimilated and attached to their cause, against the other races, forming more than half the population of Hungary. This point of populus and plebs may seem at first sight somewhat pedantic and technical; but in reality it is the key which explains the whole social structure of Hungary, even its economic and agrarian problems.

The period from the death of Joseph II. to the great revolutionary movement of 1848 may be regarded, so far as eastern Europe is concerned, as a period when nationality is simmering everywhere. It is a period of preparation for the rise of national States—ushered in by the great crime of the Polish Partition, to which so many modern evils may be traced, and closed by a sudden explosion which shook Europe from Paris to Budapest, from Palermo to Berlin. The first stage was of course the long Napoleonic war, during which the seed was sown broadcast; the second, the era of reaction and political exhaustion (1815-1848), when all that was best in Europe concentrated in the Romantic movement in literature, art, and music.

For Austria this period was bound up with the name of Metternich, who personified the old hide-bound methods of the bureaucracy, the diplomacy of a past age, to which the nations were mere pawns on a chessboard. Under him the "Police-State" assumed its most perfect form, a form not even surpassed by Russia from 1881 to 1905.

Then came the year 1848, when the dams burst. The Hungarian constitution, restored in its entirety, became for a time the watchword and inspirer of the movement, while Austria for the first time received a serious constitution. Unhappily the issue between Reaction and Progress was not a clear one. The Magyars in Hungary unquestionably stood for historic development and constitutional rights, but they also stood for racial hegemony, for the forcible assimilation of all the other races, for a unitary Magyar State instead of the old polyglot Hungary. They thus drove all the other races to coalesce with the dynasty and the forces of reaction. The result was a violent racial war, with all kinds of excesses. Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Roumanians, Saxons, all fought against the Magyars, and finally the scale was turned by the Russian troops who poured across the Carpathians in the name of outraged autocracy.

There followed the inevitable reaction, which again can be best summed up in two phrases—that of Prince Felix Schwarzenberg, "Austria will astonish the world by her ingratitude," so strikingly fulfilled in the Crimean War, when Austria left Russia in the lurch; and that of a Hungarian patriot, "The other races have received as reward what we Magyars receive as punishment." In short, the statesmen of Vienna, untaught by experience, reverted to the old bureaucratic and absolutist regime.

For ten years (1849-1859) this endured—Clericalism rampant, financial ruin, stagnation everywhere. Then Nationality burst its bonds once more. The war with Napoleon III. ended in Austria's loss of Lombardy and the creation of the Italian kingdom. Faced by the bankruptcy of the whole political and financial system, Francis Joseph launched into a period of constitutional experiment. Following the line of least resistance, as throughout his long reign, he inclined now to federalism, now to centralism, and he was still experimenting when the war of 1866 broke out. For Austria this war was decisive, for its results were her final expulsion both from Germany and from Italy, and the creation of that fatal Dual System which has distorted her whole subsequent development.

Under the Ausgleich or Compromise of 1867 the Dual Monarchy is composed of two equal and separate States, the Empire of Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary, each possessing a distinct parliament and cabinet of its own, but both sharing between them the three Joint Ministries of Foreign Affairs, War, and Finance. The chiefs of these three offices are equally responsible to both Delegations, which are committees of the two Parliaments, sitting alternately in Vienna and Budapest, but acting quite independently of each other.

This system really secured the political power in Austria and Hungary to two races—the Germans and the Magyars, and they, as the strongest in each country, bought off the two next strongest, the Poles and the Croats, by the grant of autonomy to Galicia and Croatia. The remaining eight were not considered at all. At first this ingenious device seemed to offer fair prospects of success. But ere long—for reasons which would lead us too far—the German hegemony broke down in Austria, and the whole balance was disturbed. It gradually became clear that the system was only workable when one scale was high in the air. The history of the past forty-seven years is the history of the gradual decay of the Dual System. Austria has progressed in many ways; her institutions have steadily grown freer, her political sense has developed, universal suffrage has been introduced, racial inequalities have been reduced though not abolished, industry, art, and general culture have advanced steadily. But she has been continually hampered by Hungary, where racial monopoly has grown worse and worse. The Magyar Chauvinists attempted the impossible—the assimilation by seven million people of twelve million others. Yet in spite of every imaginable trick—a corrupt and oppressive administration, gross manipulation of the franchise, press persecution, the suppression of schools and ruthless restriction of every form of culture—the non-Magyar races are stronger to-day than in 1867. And the result of the struggle has been in Hungary a decay of political standards, a corruption of public life, such as fills even the greatest optimists with despair.

Sec.2. Hungary and Magyar Misrule.—Such an assertion may seem to run counter to the common idea of Hungary as the home of liberty and the vanguard of popular uprisings against despotism, and it is certainly incompatible with the arrogant claim of Magyar Statesmen that "nowhere in the world is there so much freedom as in Hungary." At the risk of disturbing the proportion of this chapter, I propose to give a few classic illustrations of Magyar methods, selected almost at random from an overwhelming mass of damning evidence.

On paper Hungary possesses a most admirable and enlightened law guaranteeing "the Equal Rights of Nationalities" (1868); in practice, it has remained almost from the very first a dead letter. Let us take the field of education. Every effort, legal and illegal, has been made to Magyarise the educational system, with the result that in all the primary and secondary schools under State control Magyar is the exclusive language of instruction, while the number of denominational schools has been steadily diminished and their sphere of action, as more favourable to the non-Magyar races, materially restricted. Fifty years ago the Slovaks, who even then numbered over two millions, possessed three gymnasia (middle schools) which they had founded and maintained by their own exertions. In 1875 all three were arbitrarily closed by orders of the Hungarian Government, and since that date the unhappy Slovaks have not been allowed a single secondary school in which their own language is taught, while the number of their primary schools has been reduced from 1821 in 1869 to 440 in 1911. The deliberate aim is, of course, to prevent the growth of a Slovak middle class. It is quite a common thing for schoolboys to be persecuted or even dismissed for showing Slovak proclivities or even talking their mother—tongue "ostentatiously" on the street. Only last year a brilliant young Slovak student, known to me personally, was deprived by the Magyar authorities of a scholarship in Oriental languages, for no other reason than that he was "untrustworthy in a national sense"![1] Such instances are even more frequent among the Roumanians of Hungary. A specially notorious case occurred in March 1912 at Grosswardein, when sixteen Roumanian theological students were expelled from the Catholic seminary for the "demonstrative use" of their language, which was regarded as offensive by their fellow-students and professors!

[Footnote 1: This document is in my possession.]

Linguistic restrictions are carried to outrageous lengths. There is not a single inscription in any language save Magyar in any post office or railway station throughout Hungary. Slovak medals and stamps, produced in America and bearing such treasonable inscriptions as "For our Slovak language" and "I am proud to be a Slovak," have been confiscated in Hungary. Only Magyar inscriptions are tolerated on the tombstones of the Budapest cemeteries. The erection of monuments to Roumanian or Slovak patriots has more than once been prohibited, and the funds collected have been arbitrarily seized and applied to Magyar purposes. National colours, other than the Magyar, are strictly forbidden. Two years ago, at the funeral of a Roumanian poet at Kronstadt (Transylvania) gendarmes pressed up to the hearse and clipped off the colours from a wreath which had been sent by the Society of Journalists in Bucarest. About the same time a nurse was sent to prison because a child of three was found wearing a Roumanian tricolor bow, and its parents were reprimanded and fined. Last July on the very eve of war, fifteen theological students, returning to Bucarest from an excursion into Transylvania, were arrested at the frontier by Hungarian gendarmes, hauled by main force out of the train, sent back to Hermannstadt and kept for days in gaol; their offence consisted in waving some Roumanian tricolors from the train windows as they steamed out of the last station in Hungary!

No law of association exists in Hungary, and the government uses its arbitrary powers to prohibit or suppress even such harmless organisations as temperance societies, choral unions, or women's leagues. Perhaps the most notorious examples are the dissolution of the Slovak Academy in 1875 and of the Roumanian National Party's organisation in 1894; but the treatment meted out to trades unions and working-class organisations, both Magyar and non-Magyar, for years past, has been equally scandalous. The right of assembly is no less precarious in a country where parliamentary candidates are arrested or expelled from their constituencies, where deputies are prevented from addressing their constituents, where an electoral address is often treated as a penal offence.

As for Hungary's electoral system, the less said the better. Gerrymandering, a narrow and complicated franchise, bribery and corruption on a gigantic scale, the wholesale use of troops and gendarmes to prevent opposition voters from reaching the polls, the cooking of electoral rolls, illegal disqualifications, sham counts, official terrorism, and in many cases actual bloodshed—such are but a few of the methods which preserve a political monopoly in the hands of a corrupt and increasingly inefficient racial oligarchy, in a country where the absence of the ballot places the peasant peculiarly at the mercy of the authorities. Small wonder, then, if the non-Magyar races of Hungary, who on a basis of population would have had 198 deputies, never were allowed to elect more than 25, and if even this scanty number was at the infamous elections of 1910 reduced by terrorism and corruption to eight!

In judicial matters the situation is no less galling. Petitions are not accepted in the courts, unless drawn up in Magyar, and the whole proceedings are invariably conducted in the same language. The non-Magyar "stands like an ox" before the courts of his native land, and a whole series of provisions exists for his repression, notably the monstrous paragraphs dealing with "action hostile to the State," with the "incitement of one nationality against another" and with the "glorification of a criminal action"—applied with rigorous severity to all political opponents of Magyarisation but never to its advocates. Let me cite one classic example of the latter. In 1898 a well-known Slovak editor was sentenced to eight months' imprisonment for two articles severely criticising the Magyarisation of place-names in Hungary. On his return from prison he was met at the railway station of the little county town by a crowd of admirers: songs were sung, a short speech of welcome was delivered and a bouquet of flowers was presented. The sequel of this perfectly orderly incident was that no fewer than twenty-four persons, including Mr. Hurban the leading Slovak poet, were sentenced to terms of imprisonment varying from fourteen days to six months. The three girls who had presented the flowers were let off with a fine of L16.

Perhaps the reader will regard me as a very dangerous conspirator, when I tell him that in June 1910 an old lady of seventy-three, the widow of a high-school headmaster, was fined L4 because I had called at her house for twenty minutes on election day without its being notified to the police, and that in June 1914 an enquiry was instituted by the local authorities against some Slovak friends who had entertained me to luncheon! And yet I can honestly assert that I have never been guilty of any worse crime than Captain Grose, of whom Burns warned my countrymen a hundred years ago in the famous line:

A chiel's amang ye takin' notes!

The fabric of Magyar rule is far too rotten and corrupt to regard with equanimity any extensive note-taking on the part of the outer world.

Whole books might be written to illustrate the contention that in matters of education, administration, and justice, of association and assembly, of the franchise and the press, the non-Magyar nationalities of Hungary have long been the victims of a policy of repression which is without any parallel in civilised Europe. It is this Magyar system, from which I have lifted but a corner of the veil, that is one of the mainsprings of the present war, and if there is to be a new and healthy Europe in the future, this system must be swept away root, branch and stock. To such lengths has national fanaticism driven the Magyars that in 1906 it was possible for an ex-Premier of Hungary, speaking in open Parliament amid the applause of the majority, to lay down the following axiom: "The legal State is the aim: but with this question we can only concern ourselves when we have already assured the national State.... Hungary's interests demand its erection on the most extreme Chauvinist lines." Men who applaud such a sentiment are worthy allies of those so-called statesmen who regard international treaties as "a mere scrap of paper."

Sec.3. The Decay of the Dual System.—The radical divergence of political development in Austria and in Hungary, its paralysing effect upon the foreign policy of the Monarchy as a whole, coupled with the growth of national feeling among the minor nationalities and their steady emancipation from the economic thraldom of the German and the Jew—all this has slowly but surely undermined the Dual System and rendered its final collapse inevitable. Indeed for some time past it has merely owed its survival to the old age of the Emperor, who has a natural reluctance to destroy his own creation. For some years it has been known that his heir, Francis Ferdinand, was the advocate of far-reaching changes, which would have taken the form of a compromise between a federalist and a centralist system. His abrupt removal from the scene was secretly welcomed by all those whose political and racial monopoly was bound up with the existing regime.

German dominance in Austria, it should be added, meant a close alliance with the German Empire; and every fresh effort of the subject races to emancipate themselves from Germanising or Magyarising tendencies forged the chains of the alliance closer and increased the dependence of the Magyar oligarchy upon Berlin. As in mediaeval times, so in the twentieth century Habsburg policy is explained by two famous Latin mottoes—Viribus unitis ("Union is strength") and Divide et impera ("Divide and rule"). Between these two watchwords Francis Joseph and his advisers have wavered for sixty-five years.

What then are the forces which have held Austria-Hungary together under Francis Joseph? First unquestionably comes the dynasty; for it would be difficult to over-estimate the power exercised by the dynastic tradition on the many races under Habsburg sway. Next comes the Joint Army; for there is no finer body of men in Europe than the Austrian officers' corps, poorly paid, hard-worked, but inspired to the last man with unbounded devotion to the Imperial house, and to a large extent immune from that spirit of caste which is the most offensive feature of the allied German army.[1] Hardly less important are the Catholic Church, with its vast material resources and its powerful influence on peasant, small tradesman and court alike, and the bureaucracy, with its traditions of red tape, small-mindedness, slowness of movement and genial Gemuetlichkeit ("easy-goingness"). It is only after these forces that we can fairly count the parliaments and representative government. And yet there are no fewer than twenty-three legislative bodies in the Monarchy—the two central parliaments of Vienna and Budapest, entirely distinct from each other; the two Delegations; the provincial Diets, seventeen in Austria, one in Croatia; and the Diet of Bosnia, whose every legislative act requires the ratification of the Joint Minister of Finance and of the Austrian and Hungarian Governments.

[Footnote 1: It is in no way a "preserve" of the aristocracy, being largely recruited from the middle and even lower-middle class.]

Against all this there is one supremely disintegrating force—the principle of Nationality. Only a map can make clear the racial complications of the Dual Monarchy, and even the largest scale map fails to show how inextricably the various races are interwoven in many districts of Hungary or Bohemia. The following table offers at least a statistical survey:

(1) Racial— Austria. Hungary. Bosnia. Germans 9,950,266 2,037,435 .. Czechs {6,435,983 .. .. Slovaks { 1,967,970 .. Poles 4,967,984 .. .. Ruthenes 3,518,854 472,587 .. Magyars (including 900,000 Jews) .. 10,050,575 .. Croats } 783,334 1,833,162 {1,875,000 Serbs } 1,106,471 { Slovenes 1,252,940 .. .. Roumanians 275,422 2,949,032 .. Italians 768,422 27,307 .. Others .. 374,105 ..

(2) Religious— Roman Catholic 22,530,000 10,888,138 451,686 Uniate Catholic 3,417,000 2,025,508 .. Orthodox 660,000 2,987,163 856,158 Calvinist } 589,000 2,621,329 .. Lutheran } 1,340,143 .. Mohammedan .. .. 626,649 Jewish 1,314,000 932,458 .. Minor Sects 56,000 91,748 ..

Total population 28,324,940 20,886,487 1,898,044

Sec.4. The Genesis of the Southern Slavs.—The foregoing survey of tendencies in Austria-Hungary is utterly incomplete and inadequate, but it may perhaps serve as a basis for further study. Let us now consider her rival in the dispute which has led to the great war—Serbia.

Here, at the outset, it cannot be emphasised too strongly that those who regard the problem merely as a dispute between the government of Vienna and the government of Belgrade have not grasped even its elements. The Southern Slav question goes far deeper and wider than that; it must be treated as a whole, and of it Serbia is only a part. In any study of the Slavonic races the first fact which emerges is that they fall naturally into two main groups—the northern and the southern—divided by a solid wedge of three non-Slavonic races, the German, the Magyar, and the Roumanian, stretching from the Kiel Canal to the Black Sea. It is with the southern group that we are concerned.

The Southern Slavs fall into four sections—the Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, and Bulgars, who between them occupy the whole country from southern Carinthia to central Thrace. The significance of the Bulgars will be dealt with elsewhere, and of the Slovenes it will suffice for our present purpose to say that they are a small and ancient race, of vigorous stock and clerical leanings, whose true importance lies in their geographical position and its latent possibilities for the future. The Croats and Serbs occupy the border-line between West and East, between Rome and Byzantium, between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Broadly speaking, every Croat is a Catholic, every Serb an Orthodox. Broadly speaking again, the Croat language is Serb written with Latin characters, the Serb language Croat written in the Cyrilline alphabet.

Despite their common language, the two kindred races have never all been united under a single ruler. From the ninth to the end of the eleventh century the Duchy, then Kingdom, of Croatia was governed by native princes, upon whose extinction it was conquered by Hungary. For eight centuries Croatia has enjoyed an autonomous position under the Holy Crown of St. Stephen; its scope has varied according to the political constellation, but till 1912 its constant tradition had remained unbroken. Meanwhile the Dalmatian coast towns remained a bone of contention between Venice and Hungary; but the marble Lions on their battered walls are still the best proof of the triumph of Italian culture within them. Ragusa alone resisted both Venetians and Turks, and preserved herself inviolate as the home of commerce and the muses, until her tiny Republic was destroyed by Napoleon in 1808. The Kingdom of Serbia developed on more distinctively Slavonic lines. During its great days in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries under the Nemanja dynasty it dominated the Balkan Peninsula, produced a code of law which is unique in mediaeval records, developed a prosperous commerce and mining industries, and seemed on the point of striking a new note in architecture. Her greatest Tsar, Stephen Dushan, died mysteriously of poison, when his hosts were already thundering at the gates of Constantinople (1356). But the greatness of his empire did not survive him, and only a generation later Serbian independence received its death-blow on the fatal field of Kosovo—the Flodden of the Balkans, but an event far direr in its consequences than Flodden was to Scotland. Bosnia and a fragment of Serbia lingered on under more or less independent rulers till the middle of the fifteenth century. Then the Turkish night replaced the Turkish twilight. From 1463 to 1804 the national life of the Serbs lay utterly crushed. In Serbia their nobility was literally wiped out, in Bosnia it accepted Islam in order to save its lands. The relations of conqueror and conquered are best characterised by the single fact that a Christian who failed to dismount from his horse on meeting a Turk was liable to be killed on the spot.

Throughout this period of utter gloom only two things served to keep alive the Serb tradition—their splendid popular ballads, unequalled in Europe for directness and imagination, save, perhaps, by the ballads of the Anglo-Scottish Border; and the clergy of the Orthodox Church, poor ignorant despised peasants like their flock, yet bravely keeping the national flame burning. The one bright spot was the tiny mountain eyrie of Montenegro, which stubbornly maintained its freedom under a long succession of warrior-priests.

The Serb Patriarchate, which had long had its seat in Ipek, migrated to Austria in 1690, at the special invitation of the Emperor Leopold I., and has ever since been established (though the title of patriarch lapsed for a time) at Karlowitz on the Danube. Large settlements of refugee Serbs from Turkey followed their spiritual chief to Croatia, Slavonia and the southern plains of Hungary between 1690 and 1740. The special privileges granted to them by the emperor were, however, gradually undermined and revoked by the Hungarian Estates. Meanwhile the "Military Frontiers" were extended on essentially democratic lines: a land-tenure subject to military service bred a hereditary race of soldiers and officers devoted to the Imperial idea, and it has taken many long long years of bungling on the part of Viennese and Magyar diplomacy to efface that devotion.

Thus the Habsburg dominions became the centre of culture for the Serbs, whose literary revival came from Neusatz, Karlowitz and even Buda. It was not only under Prince Eugene that they looked to the Habsburgs for aid. Kara George, who led their first serious rising in 1804 more than once offered himself to Vienna.

In the Balkans the Serbs were the first to revolt, and won their own freedom, with less help than Greeks, Roumanians or Bulgarians, and under far less favourable circumstances. Thus Serbia is essentially a self-made man among States, built from the foundations upwards, and possessing no aristocracy and hardly even a middle class. Her curse has been the rivalry of two, or rather three native dynasties, the Karageorgevitch, the Obrenovitch and the Petrovitch; and this rivalry has borne fruit in three dastardly political crimes—the murder of the heroic Black George in 1817, by order of his rival Milosh Obrenovitch; of Prince Michael, Serbia's wisest ruler, by the adherents of George's son; and finally of King Alexander and his wife in June 1903. The history of the Southern Slavs for the last century has been a slow movement towards national unity, overshadowed, sometimes hastened, sometimes paralysed, by the rivalry of Austria and Russia for the hegemony of the Balkan Peninsula. Till 1875 the influence of the two Powers alternated in Belgrade, and there was nothing definite to suggest which influence would win, though of course Russia may be said to have possessed an advantage in her position as the foremost Orthodox power and as the greatest among the Slavonic brotherhood of races. That year, however, brought a fresh rising of Bosnia and Herzegovina against Turkish rule, and in defence of this purely Serbo-Croat province public opinion in Serbia and Montenegro rose. Side by side the two little principalities fought the Turks and risked their all upon the issue. The provinces were to the last man friendly and welcomed their action. Then, when the battle seemed won, Austria-Hungary at the Congress of Berlin stepped in and occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina—with the active approval of Disraeli and Salisbury. The inhabitants resisted stoutly, but were overcome. Thus was realised the first stage upon the road of the Austrian advance towards Salonica. Serbia received compensation at Nia
, Pirot, and Vranja; Montenegro acquired the open roadstead of Antivari and a scrap of barren coast-line; but the hearts of both still clung to Bosnia.