Some one has said that evolution is a fact and progress a sentiment. This definition casts a doubt on progress: it implies that progressive thinkers are in the category of sentimentalists who do not deal in facts.
If no alternative existed between looking back on the slow advance of evolution and looking forward in a spirit of sentimental hope, the present situation would be dark indeed; a pessimist might be inclined to conclude that civilization had ceased to advance, that, on the contrary, its movement was retrograde.
There is surely a middle course—a course not easy to pursue. It consists in standing on the ground of fact, however miry, with heart and head uplifted, and looking forward, with the determination not to let mankind sink to the level of the beasts that perish, eager to reach some higher ground.
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Looking back over the past seven years, a reflective mind is appalled by their futility and waste, and yet an analysis of this period as a whole reveals that quality of ruthless logic, of inevitable sequence, to be found in some Greek tragedies, in which the naked truth in all its horror is portrayed with supreme dramatic art.
Each phase of this blood-stained period discloses the same carnival of mendacity and intrigue, the subordination of the public interest to the designs of a few ambitious men, the exploitation of patriotism, self-sacrifice, patience and valour by officials, whose inhuman outlook and mediocrity of mind were screened by a mask of mystery. A piecemeal study would be profitless. Military instruction might be gained from oft-recurring slaughter, and hints on how to hoodwink peoples could certainly be gathered from spasmodic intervals of peace. But these are not the lessons the world seeks, they are precisely what it wishes to forget. Rather, the effort must be made to trace the underlying impulse in this tragic drama, which runs through it like a “leit-motif,” which welds together processes so varying in their nature, and renders them cumulative and inseparable, until they culminate in one unified and comprehensive act.
In its broadest sense, that impulse had its source in a frame of mind, in a false conception, expressed in outworn governmental systems left uncontrolled and tolerated by the victims, who, though suffering, dreaded change. This frame of mind was general throughout Europe; it was not confined to the Central Empires, whose ruling classes, by their superior efficiency, merely offered the supreme example of autocratic Governments which aimed at world-dominion both in a political and economic sense. To the junkers and business men in Germany and Austria-Hungary, the war of liberation in the Balkans in 1912 was an opportunity to be seized, with a lack of scruple as cynical as it was frank, because they hoped to fish in troubled waters; its perversion into an internecine struggle was considered clever diplomacy. The Treaty of Bucharest in 1913 was regarded as a triumph of statecraft, since it caused a readjustment of the “Balance of Power” in favour of themselves. But the so-called democratic Western Powers gave their tacit acquiescence to these nefarious proceedings; their association with the Russian Empire, so far from being designed to correct immorality and injustice, perpetuated all the evils of a system based on interested motives and selfish fears. The family of nations consisted of six Great Powers; Small States existed under sufferance and were treated as poor relations. Their rights were nebulous and sometimes inconvenient, not to be recognized until they could be extorted. This happened sometimes. The “Balance of Power” was a net with closely woven meshes. Even the strongest carnivori in the European jungle required, at times, the assistance of a mouse.
Judged by its conduct of affairs in 1912 and the early part of 1913, the British Government was without a Continental policy; at first, it seemed to favour Austria-Hungary, the Albanian settlement and the Treaty of Bucharest were a triumph for the “Ball-Platz,”[48] though both these transactions were shortsighted and unjust. French policy was paralysed by fear of Germany, and, owing to a mistaken choice of representatives in almost all the Balkan capitals, the French Foreign Office was curiously ill-informed. Italy was the ally of the Central Powers and could not realize her own colonial aspirations without their help. Russia, as ever, was the enigma, and Russian policy in the Balkans, though ostensibly benevolent, aimed at the reduction of Bulgaria and Servia to the position of vassal States. Rumania was also an ally of the Central Powers. Dynastic and economic reasons made her their client. She held aloof from purely Balkan questions, and posed as the “Sentinel of the East.”
Under such conditions, it was idle to expect an objective and reasonable, or even decent, handling of Balkan questions. Bulgaria was sacrificed ruthlessly to opportunism and expediency. The most efficient race on the south bank of the Danube was embittered and driven into unnatural hostility to Russia. The Balkan bloc was disrupted by skilful manipulation of national feeling, which was in many cases honest and sincere, and thus, the Central Empires were able to so dispose the pawns on the European chessboard as to facilitate their opening moves, if, from a continuance in their policy of expansion, there should ensue a European War.