Let us fix our attention on one or two salient points. Europe has often been accustomed to watch with anxiety the rise of some potent arbiter of her destinies who seems to arrogate to himself a large personal dominion. There was Philip II. There was Louis XIV. There was Napoleon a hundred years ago. Then, a mere shadow of his great ancestor, there was Napoleon III. Then, after the Franco-German war, there was Bismarck. Now it is Kaiser Wilhelm II. The emergence of some ambitious personality naturally makes Europe suspicious and watchful, and leads to the formation of leagues and confederations against him. The only thing, however, which seems to have any power of real resistance to the potential tyrant is not the manœuvring of diplomats, but the steady growth of democracy in Europe, which, in virtue of its character and principles, steadily objects to the despotism of any given individual, and the arbitrary designs of a personal will. We had hoped that the spread of democracies in all European nations would progressively render dynastic wars an impossibility. The peoples would cry out, we hoped, against being butchered to make a holiday for any latter-day Cæsar. But democracy is a slow growth, and exists in very varying degrees of strength in different parts of our continent. Evidently it has not yet discovered its own power. We have sadly to recognise that its range of influence and the new spirit which it seeks to introduce into the world are as yet impotent against the personal ascendancy of a monarch and the old conceptions of high politics. European democracy is still too vague, too dispersed, too unorganised, to prevent the breaking out of a bloody international conflict.
The Personal Factor
Europe then has still to reckon with the personal factor—with all its vagaries and its desolating ambitions. Let us see how this has worked in the case before us. In 1888 the present German Emperor ascended the throne. Two years afterwards, in March 1890, the Pilot was dropped—Bismarck resigned. The change was something more than a mere substitution of men like Caprivi and Hohenlohe for the Iron Chancellor. There was involved a radical alteration in policy. The Germany which was the ideal of Bismarck's dreams was an exceedingly prosperous self-contained country, which should flourish mainly because it developed its internal industries as well as paid attention to its agriculture, and secured its somewhat perilous position in the centre of Europe by skilful diplomatic means of sowing dissension amongst its neighbours. Thus Bismarck discouraged colonial extensions. He thought they might weaken Germany. On the other hand, he encouraged French colonial policy, because he thought it would divert the French from their preoccupation with the idea of revanche. He played, more or less successfully, with England, sometimes tempting her with plausible suggestions that she should join the Teutonic Empires on the Continent, sometimes thwarting her aims by sowing dissensions between her and her nearest neighbour, France. But there was one empire which, certainly, Bismarck dreaded not so much because she was actually of much importance, but because she might be. That empire was Russia. The last thing in the world Bismarck desired was precisely that approximation between France and Russia which ended in the strange phenomenon of an offensive and defensive alliance between a western republic and a semi-eastern despotic empire.
Kaiser Wilhelm
Kaiser Wilhelm II had very different ideals for Germany, and in many points he simply reversed the policy of Bismarck. He began to develop the German colonial empire, and in order that it might be protected he did all in his power to encourage the formation of a large German navy. He even allowed himself to say that "the future of Germany was on the sea." It was part of that peculiar form of personal autocracy which the Kaiser introduced that he should from time to time invent phrases suggestive of different principles of his policy. Side by side with the assertion that Germany's future was on the sea, we have the phrases "Germany wants her place in the sun" and that the "drag" of Teutonic development is "towards the East." The reality and imminence of "a yellow peril" was another of his devices for stimulating the efforts of his countrymen. Thus the new policy was expansion, evolution as a world-power, colonisation; and each in turn brought him up against the older arrangement of European Powers. His colonial policy, especially in Africa, led to collisions with both France and Great Britain. The building of the fleet, the Kiel Canal, and other details of maritime policy naturally made England very suspicious, while the steady drag towards the East rendered wholly unavoidable the conflict between Teutonism and the Slav races. Germany looked, undoubtedly, towards Asia Minor, and for this reason made great advances to and many professions of friendship for the Ottoman Empire. Turkey, indeed, in several phrases was declared to be "the natural ally" of Germany in the Near East. And if we ask why, the answer nowadays is obvious. Not only was Turkey to lend herself to the encouragement of German commercial enterprise in Asia Minor, but she was, in the judgment of the Emperor, the one power which could in time of trouble make herself especially obnoxious to Great Britain. She could encourage revolt in Egypt, and still more, through the influence of Mahommedanism, stir up disaffection in India.[2]
[2] Turkey has now joined Germany.