Accordingly we can impute to the acts of particular persons little more than the choice of time and occasion for the outbreak of hostilities. The time may have been inauspicious; the occasion may have been one that will not look well in history. For the underlying forces working cumulatively toward an issue, we must, however, look elsewhere than to personal volition.
The greed of the armament industries and the incessant playing upon popular opinion by their subsidized organs have often been assigned to a chief rôle in the drama of international discord. Competitive military preparations, drawing to themselves an increasing share of the intellectual energies of a nation, have long been regarded as a menace to the peace of the world. Every organ seeks to exercise a function. The Crown Prince of Germany, in his panegyric of militarism, expresses poignant regret that all the splendid military forces of the Empire should be expended futilely, in peaceful show. Professional warriors want war, and will work to bring it about.
The future historian will doubtless give weight to the above mentioned forces, as well as to many others that can not here be touched upon. But he will assign vastly more importance than we of today, to the national antipathies engendered by the scramble for colonial possessions, and to the motives giving rise to it. It may be worth our while, even now, to fix our attention upon this aspect of the question. Not only for the light that may be thrown upon the fundamental causes of the present conflict, but also for the grounds we may discern for conjectures as to the international relations of the future.
II
Every one at all familiar with recent German literature will recall frequent references to the Drang nach Morgenland. The “impulse toward the Land of the Morning”—fit inspiration for a sentimental nation. It has been pointed out, again and again, that the open road to German expansion lies in the direction of Anatolia, Syria and Mesopotamia. Indeed, the expansion has been actually taking place, by a process of infiltration, as it were. Recall the Bagdad Railway, the German incursions into Ottoman finance, the German reorganization of the Turkish army. All that lay between the Germans and their dream of the Morgenland was a group of petty states, easily to be subjugated or overleaped, and the decaying Turkish political organization.
But there was an irreconcilable Russian dream of Constantinople and the Eastern Mediterranean, and a British dream of a sub-tropic zone, all the way to India, taking laws, if from any power, from Britain.
For years, as every one knows, these dreams have played at cards with the Balkans. Not to go beyond the present century, did we not see Russian influence steadily advancing there, until rudely checked by Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina? Again, the insidious development of Russian influence, culminating in the humiliation of Bulgaria in the Second Balkan War, but checked by the creation of an independent Albania under a German prince. Russian influence encroaching once more, stimulated by the Albanian fiasco and the intensification of Pan-Serbism, to be checked—for no doubt so it was intended—by the utter humiliation of Servia. Probably it was not believed that Russia would trump the Austrian ace. But who could suppose that, in such a game, the trumps would not, sooner or later, be drawn out?
It would be interesting to know why the ace was led just now, and why it was trumped at this precise moment. What is of more importance, however, is to know why the game was set. What did Germany want with the Land of the Morning? What does the Eastern Mediterranean mean to Russia? And what would it signify to England if either dream were realized? Is it matter of sentiment, of “historic mission,” or is it matter of practical interest? And if matter of practical interest, whose interest weighs so heavily that it must be bought with cities in ruins and provinces devastated, with hundreds of thousands of the best and most useful lives sent down to dusty death?
Manifestly, not the interest of the mass of humanity.