Complete Works

Emperor.
    Already the voice of surmises has been heard hinting tentatively at a possible re-grouping of European Powers.  The alliance of the three Empires is supposed possible.  And it may be possible.  The myth of Russia’s power is dying very hard — hard enough for that combination to take place — such is the fascination that a discredited show of numbers will still exercise upon the imagination of a people trained to the worship of force.  Germany may be willing to lend its support to a tottering autocracy for the sake of an undisputed first place, and of a preponderating voice in the settlement of every question in that south-east of Europe which merges into Asia.  No principle being involved in such an alliance of mere expediency, it would never be allowed to stand in the way of Germany’s other ambitions.  The fall of autocracy would bring its restraint automatically to an end.  Thus it may be believed that the support Russian despotism may get from its once humble friend and client will not be stamped by that thoroughness which is supposed to be the mark of German superiority.  Russia weakened down to the second place, or Russia eclipsed altogether during the throes of her regeneration, will answer equally well the plans of German policy — which are many and various and often incredible, though the aim of them all is the same: aggrandisement of territory and influence, with no regard to right and justice, either in the East or in the West.  For that and no other is the true note of your Welt-politik which desires to live.
    The German eagle with a Prussian head looks all round the horizon, not so much for something to do that would count for good in the records of the earth, as simply for something good to get.  He gazes upon the land and upon the sea with the same covetous steadiness, for he has become of late a maritime eagle, and has learned to box the compass.  He gazes north and south, and east and west, and is inclined to look intemperately upon the waters of the Mediterranean when they are blue.  The disappearance of the Russian phantom has given a foreboding of unwonted freedom to the Welt-politik .  According to the national tendency this assumption of Imperial impulses would run into the grotesque were it not for the spikes of the pickelhaubes peeping out grimly from behind.  Germany’s attitude proves that no peace for the earth can be found in the expansion of material interests which she seems to have adopted exclusively as her only aim, ideal, and watchword.  For the use of those who gaze half-unbelieving at the passing away of the Russian phantom, part Ghoul, part Djinn, part Old Man of the Sea, and wait half-doubting for the birth of a nation’s soul in this age which knows no miracles, the once-famous saying of poor Gambetta, tribune of the people (who was simple and believed in the “immanent justice of things”), may be adapted in the shape of a warning that, so far as a future of liberty, concord, and justice is concerned: “Le Prussianisme — voilà l’ennemi!”
     

THE CRIME OF PARTITION — 1919
     
    At the end of the eighteenth century, when the partition of Poland had become an accomplished fact, the world qualified it at once as a crime.  This strong condemnation proceeded, of course, from the West of Europe; the Powers of the Centre, Prussia and Austria, were not likely to admit that this spoliation fell into the category of acts morally reprehensible and carrying the taint of anti-social guilt.  As to Russia, the third party to the crime, and the originator of the scheme, she had no national conscience at the time.  The will of its rulers was always accepted by the people as the expression of an omnipotence derived directly from God.  As an act of mere conquest the best excuse for the partition lay simply in the fact that it happened to be possible; there was the plunder and there was the opportunity to get hold of it.  Catherine the Great looked upon this extension of her dominions with a cynical satisfaction.  Her political argument that the destruction of Poland meant the repression of revolutionary ideas and the checking of the spread of Jacobinism in Europe was a characteristically impudent pretence.  There may have been minds here and there amongst the Russians that perceived, or perhaps only felt, that by the annexation of the greater part of the Polish Republic, Russia approached nearer to the comity of civilised nations and ceased, at