Today, after two years of the war, there can be no further doubt that we cannot hope for an unconditional victory over Russians, English, French, Italians, Rumanians, and Americans, and that we cannot reckon upon the overthrow of our enemies. But we can reach a compromised peace only upon the basis of the evacuation of the occupied territories, the possession of which in any case signifies for us a burden and weakness and the peril of new wars. Consequently, everything should be avoided which hinders a change of course on the part of those enemy groups which might perhaps still be won over to the idea of compromise—the British Radicals and the Russian Reactionaries. Even from this point of view our Polish project is just as objectionable as any interference with Belgian rights, or the execution of British citizens—to say nothing of the mad submarine war scheme.
Our future lies upon the water. True, but it therefore does not lie in Poland and Belgium, in France and Serbia. That is a reversion to the Holy Roman Empire, to the aberrations of the Hohenstaufens and Hapsburgs. It is the policy of the Plantagenets, not the policy of Drake and Raleigh, Nelson and Rhodes.
Triple Alliance policy is a relapse into the past, a revolt from the future, from imperialism, from world policy. Central Europe is mediaevalism; Berlin-Bagdad is a cul de sac, and not a road into the open, to unlimited possibilities, and to the world mission of the German people.
I am no enemy of Austria, or Hungary, or Italy, or Serbia, or any other State; I am only an enemy of the Triple Alliance policy, which was bound to divert us from our aims, and to bring us on to the sloping plane of Continental policy. It was not German policy, but Austrian dynastic policy. The Austrians had accustomed themselves to regard the alliance as a shield, under whose protection they could make excursions at pleasure into the East.
RUINOUS RESULTS
And what result have we to expect from the struggle of peoples? The United States of Africa will be British, like the United States of America, of Australia, and of Oceania, and the Latin States of Europe, as I said years ago, will fall into the same relationship to the United Kingdom as the Latin sisters of America to the United States. They will be dominated by the Anglo-Saxon; France, exhausted by the war, will link herself still more closely to Great Britain. In the long run, Spain also will not resist.
In Asia, the Russian and Japanese will expand their borders and their customs, and the south will remain to the British.
The world will belong to the Anglo-Saxon, the Russian, and the Japanese, and the German will remain alone with Austria and Hungary. His sphere of power will be that of thought and of trade, not that of the bureaucrats and the soldiers. The German appeared too late, and the world war has destroyed the last possibility of catching up the lost ground, of founding a colonial empire.
For we shall not supplant the sons of Japheth; the program of the great Rhodes, who saw the salvation of mankind in British expansion and British imperialism, will be realized.
Tu regere imperio populos Romano, memento.
Hae tibi erunt artes: pacisquqe imponere morem,
Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.