You may upbraid him privately if you dislike his methods; you may give him a fair warning, but as long as your bargain exists you must stick to it.
And our alliance with Austria is not a mere piece of political strategy, not an unholy alliance like that of republican France with despotic Russia or Anglo-Saxon England with Mongol Japan.
Our States have a common history. We are, as far as the Austrian Germans are concerned—about a third of the population of Austria—the same people. We have, and that is perhaps the most decisive point in the alliance, nearly the same position on the surface of the globe.
We are both inland empires situated in the centre of Europe, surrounded by many different nations, all of whom may bear some grudge against us.
As long as our joint frontiers are safe we can stand back to back and face calmly any unnatural confederation like the present one.
We concluded the alliance with Austria because we wanted to safeguard ourselves against foreign attack; it has turned out the alliance has involved us in war. We might have avoided the war at present if we had broken faith with our ally.
It would not have been difficult for us to find some legal quibbles, like those which Italy, following a policy of very sober national egotism, is now earnestly exclaiming to all the world.
If we had done so we should have been knaves, but we should have been fools as well. For surely nobody can believe that the forces antagonistic to Germany would have ceased to act if we had left Austria in the lurch.
Neither France nor Russia nor England would have changed their policy. They might, moreover, have tried to make Austria join in some future conspiracy against us.
There are three main causes to which the war is due: