to week.  Cynics have tried to define the mutual relations of Germany and Austria-Hungary by comparing the former to a strong man carrying a corpse upon his shoulders, and the course of the war during the first three months would seem to confirm this view.  So far as Austria-Hungary is concerned, its two outstanding features have been the signal failure of the “punitive expedition” against Serbia and the debacle of Auffenberg’s army in Galicia.  Friendly observers were prepared for a break-down in the higher command and were aware that many Slav regiments could not be relied upon, but they had expected more from the German and Magyar sections of the army and from the very efficient officers’ corps, as a stiffening element.  It is now known that despite the aggressive policy of its chiefs, the Austro-Hungarian army was far from ready, and that its commissariat and sanitary arrangements utterly broke down.

The evident failure to profit by the experience of two general mobilisations within the previous six years is in itself a proof that there is “something rotten in the state,” and it is already obvious that only a complete and crushing victory of Germany can extricate Austria-Hungary from the war without loss of prestige and actual territory.  Unless the Russians can be not merely defeated but driven out, it is absolutely certain that they will retain the province of Galicia, or at least the eastern portion, with its Ruthene or Ukrainian population; unless the Serbian army can be overwhelmed, Bosnia and at least some portion of Dalmatia will fall into the hands of Serbia.  This would be an eminently unsatisfactory solution or rather it would be no solution at all, for it would solve neither the Polish, the Ukraine, nor the Southern Slav questions.  I merely refer to it as a possible outcome of one form of stalemate; it is hardly necessary to add that from every point of view stalemate is the result which is most to be dreaded, since it inevitably involves fresh wars in the immediate future.  Whatever happens, the effete Dual System in its present form is doomed, for while an Austrian defeat means dissolution, an Austrian victory means the absorption of Serbia and Montenegro, and in either case the balance between Austria and Hungary will be fatally disturbed and a new constitutional arrangement rendered inevitable.  It is thus a tragic paradox that while the attempt to bolster up the Dual System was undoubtedly one of the great underlying causes of the war, its first effect is likely to be the collapse of that very system.

The Dual System once abolished, it might seem reasonable to aim at a reconstruction of Austria-Hungary on a modified federal basis.  But this was essentially a peace-ideal.  The war, far from kindling a common patriotism which in Austria-Hungary was so conspicuous by its absence, has placed a gulf of blood between race and race, and rendered their continued existence under the same roof not only difficult but undesirable.