The future Marshal von Moltke, also inspired by Pangermanism, had written, as far back as 1844: “We hope that Austria will uphold the rights and protect the future of the Danube lands, and that Germany will finally succeed in keeping open the mouth of her great rivers” (see V. Moltke Schriften, t. II., p. 313).
The author of a pamphlet published in 1895, i.e. exactly twenty-one years ago, inspired by this doctrine of fraud and protected by the Alldeutscher Verband, the most powerful Pangerman Society, after expounding the main plan of future annexations, concludes with simple effrontery thus:
No doubt the newly-constituted Empires will not be peopled merely by Germans, but: “Germans alone will govern; they alone will exercise political rights; they alone will serve in the Army and in the Navy; they alone will have the right to become landowners; thus they will acquire the conviction that, as in the Middle Ages, the Germans are a people of rulers. However, they will condescend so far as to delegate inferior tasks to foreign subjects subservient to Germany” (see Grossdeutschland und Mitteleuropa um das Jahr 1950, published by Thormann und Goetsch, Berlin, p. 48).
Identity of race and language served for a long time to justify Pangermanism; but the facts we have shown and the explicit declarations we have quoted prove clearly that race and language were merely a pretext for the diffusion of the Pangerman doctrine inspired by Prussia. If we dissect this doctrine we find it is composed of cupidity both political and economic. The truth is that Pangermanism is a scheme of piracy to be carried on for the benefit of the Prussian monarchy. Its object is, by successive and indefinite expansions of territory to include within the same boundaries, at first economic but afterwards political, such lands and such peoples as are likely to prove a profitable possession to the Hohenzollerns themselves and to their main support, the German aristocracy.
To sum up, Pangermanism is a doctrine of international burglary, and therefore it is exactly the reverse of the principle of nationality, that noble idea ushered into the world by the French Revolution.
II.
From the Pangerman doctrine the military and political Pangerman plot was bred and stage-managed by William II. Outside of Germany, the Kaiser was looked upon, for a long time, as a peace-loving monarch. It is difficult to explain how such a very serious error could have arisen. Shortly after his accession in 1888, William II. was secretly hatching that plot which so recently has caused the European conflagration, and subsequently, by his public utterances, he has clearly showed his Pangerman tendencies.
On August 28th, 1898, in reply to the Burgomaster of Mayence’s speech, the Kaiser declared that his wish was to keep inviolate the heritage bequeathed by his “immortal grandfather.” “But,” added William, “I can only reach that goal if our authority firmly keeps sway over our neighbours. For this object the unity and the co-operation of every German tribe is required.” On the 4th October, 1900, William II., on laying the foundation stone of the Roman Museum of Saalburg, again said:
“May our German Fatherland become in the future as strongly united, as powerful, as wonderful as was the Roman universal empire; may this end be attained by the united co-operation of our princes, of our peoples, of our armies and of our citizens, in order that in the times to come it may be said of us as it used to be said of yore: Civis Romanus sum.”