In Russia and England these originally German dynasties are meeting the problems of the new time by becoming national.  They modify themselves from year to year.  The time when Britain will again have a Queen of British race may not be very remote.  The days when the affairs of Europe could be discussed at Windsor in German and from a German standpoint ended with the death of Queen Victoria, and it is only in such improvised courts as those of Greece and Bulgaria that the national outlook can still be contemplated from a foreign standpoint and discussed in a foreign tongue.  The age when the monarchical system made the courts of three-quarters of Europe a German’s Fatherland has ended for ever.  And with that, the last rational advantage of monarchy and royalist sentimentality disappears from the middle-class German’s point of view.

So it seems to me that the following conclusions about the future of Germany emerge from these considerations.  It is improbable that there will be any such revolution as overthrew French Imperialism in 1871; the new Prussian Imperialism is closer to the tradition of the people and much more firmly established through the educational propaganda of the past half-century.  But liberal forces in Germany may nevertheless be strong enough to force a peace upon the Hohenzollern empire so soon as any hopes of aggressive successes die away, before the utmost stage of exhaustion is reached, early in 1917, perhaps, or at latest in 1918.  This, we suppose, will be a restrictive peace so far as Germany is concerned, humiliating her and hampering her development.  The German Press will talk freely of a revanche and the renewal of the struggle, and this will help to consolidate the Pledged Allies in their resolve to hold Germany on every front and to retard her economic and financial recovery.  The dynasty will lose prestige gradually, the true story of the war will creep slowly into the German consciousness, and the idea of a middle-class republic, like the French Republic, only defensively militant and essentially pacific and industrial, will become more and more popular in the country.

This will have the support of strong journalists, journalists of the Harden type for example.  The dynasty tends to become degenerate, so that the probability of either some gross scandals or an ill-advised reactionary movement back to absolutism may develop a crisis within a few years of the peace settlement.  The mercantile and professional classes will join hands with the social democrats to remove the decaying incubus of the Hohenzollern system, and Germany will become a more modern and larger repetition of the Third French republic.  This collapse of the Germanic monarchical system may spread considerably beyond the limits of the German empire.  It will probably be effected without much violence as a consequence of the convergence and maturity of many streams of very obvious thought.  Many of the monarchs concerned may find themselves