[17] Ibid. The whole subject (of the neutrality of Belgium) is examined by the present writer in War, its Conduct and its Legal Results (John Murray).
[18] Vom Kriege, VIII, Kap. 6 (B).
[19] The Nation in Arms, sec. 3: “Policy creates the total situation in which the State engages in the struggle”; and again, “it is clear that the political action and military action ought always to be closely united.”
[20] Germany and the Next War: “The appropriate and conscious employment of war as a political means has always led to happy results.” And again, “The relations between two States must often be termed a latent war which is provisionally being waged in peaceful rivalry. Such a position justifies the employment of hostile methods, just as war itself does, since in such a case both parties are determined to employ them.”
[21] The Bundesrath is a Second Chamber, a Cabinet or Executive Council, and a Federal Congress of State Governments all in one. Indeed, its resemblance to a Second Chamber is superficial. It can dissolve the Reichstag when it pleases. See Laband, Die Entwickelung des Bundesraths, Jahrbuch des Oeffentlichen Rechts, 1907, Vol. I, p. 18, and also his Deutsches Staatsrecht, Vol. I, passim.
[22] I have based the remarks which follow on a close study of German, French, and English authorities—among others upon the following: Bismarck, Gedanken und Erinnerungen; Hohenlohe, Denkwürdigkeiten; Hanotaux, Histoire de la France Contemporaine; de Broglie, Mission de M. de Gontaut-Biron; Fitzmaurice, The Life of Lord Granville. All these are the works of statesmen who could legitimately say of their times quorum pars magna fui. Lord Fitzmaurice’s book, apart from its being the work of a statesman, whose knowledge of foreign affairs is equaled by few and surpassed by none, is indispensable to a study of Anglo-German relations since 1850, being based on diplomatic sources, in particular the despatches of Lord Odo Russell. Some passages in The Life of Lord Lytton are also illuminating, likewise the essays of that prince of French historians, Albert Sorel. But I have, of course, also gone to the text of treaties and original documents.
[23] The study which follows is based on cosmopolitan materials: The reader must exercise great caution in using political memories such as those of Bismarck. In autobiography, of all forms of history, as Goethe observes in the preface to Wahrheit und Dichtung, it is supremely difficult for the writer to escape self-deception; he is so apt to read himself backwards and to mistake society’s influence upon him for his influence upon society. In the case of Bismarck in particular, his autobiography often took the form of apologetics, and he invests his actions with a foresight which they did not always possess, while, on the other hand, he is so anxious to depreciate his rivals (particularly Gortchakoff) that he often robs himself of the prestige of victory. Hohenlohe is, in this respect, a far safer guide. He was not as great a man as Bismarck, but he was an infinitely more honest one.
[24] Gedanken und Erinnerungen, Bd. II, Kap. 29, p. 287.
[25] Notes of Lord Odo Russell, British Ambassador at Berlin, of a conversation with Bismarck, reported in a despatch of November 22nd, 1870, to Lord Granville, and published in the Parliamentary Papers of 1871 [Cd. 245].
[26] Gedanken und Erinnerungen, II, Kap. 23.