HERFORD AND OTHERS. Germany in the Nineteenth Century.  Manchester. 1912. (2s. 6d.) Essays on different aspects of German development.

BERNHARDT. Germany and the Next War. 1912. (2s. net.) (The philosophy and aims of Gorman militarism worked out.)

CRAMB. Germany and England. 1914. (2s. 6d. net.) (An account of Treitschke and his school of thought:  interesting for the light it throws on German misconceptions about Great Britain.)

TREITSCHKE. Selections from his Lectures on Politics. 1914.

Translated by A.L.  Gowans. (2s. net.)

The writings of the following German professors will be found interesting if procurable:  Oncken, Meinecke (both contributors to the Cambridge Modern History), Delbrueck, Sombart, Erich Marcks (see his lectures on Germany in Lectures on the History of the Nineteenth Century, edited by Kirkpatrick, Cambridge, 1900, 4s. 6d.), Schiemann, Lamprecht, Schmoller, and F. von Liszt.

Note.—­Such considered German writings as have come to hand since the outbreak of the war show little tendency to cope with the real facts of the situation, or even to seek to understand them.  They seem to indicate two developments in German opinion.

(1) A great consolidation of German national unity (except, of course, in Poland and Alsace-Lorraine).

(2) A tendency to forgo the consideration of the immediate issues and to hark back in thought to 1870 or even to the Wars of Liberation.  It is difficult to judge of a nation in arms from the writings of its stay-at-homes; but no one can read recent articles by the leaders of German thought without feeling that the Germans are still, before all things and incurably, “the people of poets and philosophers,” and that, by a tragic irony, it is the best and most characteristic qualities of the race which are sustaining and will continue to sustain it in the conflict in which its dreams have involved it.

CHAPTER IV

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY AND THE SOUTHERN SLAVS

“For a century past attempts have been made to solve the Eastern Question.  On the day when it appears to have been solved Europe will inevitably be confronted by the Austrian Question.”—­ALBERT SOREL (1902).

In April 1909, a week after the international crisis evoked by Austria’s annexation of Bosnia had come to an end, I paid my first visit to Cetinje, the tiny mountain-capital of Montenegro, and was assured by the Premier, Dr. Tomanovi, that the conflict had merely been postponed, not averted—­a fact which even then was obvious enough.  “But remember,” he said, “it is a question of Aut aut (either, or)—­either Serbia and Montenegro or Austria-Hungary.  One or other has got to go, and you may rest assured that in four, or at most five, years from now there will be a European war over this very question.”  At the time I merely regarded his prophecy as a proof of Serb megalomania, but it has been literally fulfilled.