From the very outset of this war it was manifest to the clear-headed observer that only the complete victory of German imperialism could save the dynastic system in Europe from the fate that it had challenged.  That curious system had been the natural and unplanned development of the political complications of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Two systems of monarchies, the Bourbon system and the German, then ruled Europe between them.  With the latter was associated the tradition of the European unity under the Roman empire; all the Germanic monarchs had an itch to be called Caesar.  The Kaiser of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the Czar had, so to speak, the prior claim to the title.  The Prussian king set up as a Caesar in 1871; Queen Victoria became the Caesar of India (Kaisir-i-Hind) under the auspices of Lord Beaconsfield, and last and least, that most detestable of all Coburgers, Ferdinand of Bulgaria, gave Kaiserism a touch of quaint absurdity by setting up as Czar of Bulgaria.  The weakening of the Bourbon system by the French revolution and the Napoleonic adventure cleared the way for the complete ascendancy of the Germanic monarchies in spite of the breaking away of the United States from that system.

After 1871, a constellation of quasi-divine Teutonic monarchs, of which the German Emperor, the German Queen Victoria, the German Czar, were the greatest stars, formed a caste apart, intermarried only among themselves, dominated the world and was regarded with a mystical awe by the ignorant and foolish in most European countries.  The marriages, the funerals, the coronations, the obstetrics of this amazing breed of idols were matters of almost universal worship.  The Czar and Queen Victoria professed also to be the heads of religion upon earth.  The court-centered diplomacies of the more firmly rooted monarchies steered all the great liberating movements of the nineteenth century into monarchical channels.  Italy was made a monarchy; Greece, the motherland of republics, was handed over to a needy scion of the Danish royal family; the sturdy peasants of Bulgaria suffered from a kindred imposition.  Even Norway was saddled with as much of a king as it would stand, as a condition of its independence.  At the dawn of the twentieth century republican freedom seemed a remote dream beyond the confines of Switzerland and France—­and it had no very secure air in France.  Reactionary scheming has been an intermittent fever in the French republic for six and forty years.  The French foreign office is still undemocratic in tradition and temper.  But for the restless disloyalty of the Hohenzollerns this German kingly caste might be dominating the world to this day.