Russia has the immense and healthy world of Siberia into which to overflow.  France, far from needing outlets, increases not at all, and during 1911 showed an excess of close on 40,000 deaths over births.  For France the day of greatness is past.  A French Empire, in any other sense than the Roman one of commercial and military exploitation of occupied territories and subjugated peoples is gone forever.

France has no blood to give except in war.  French blood will not colonize even the Mediterranean littoral.  Italy is faced with something of the same problem as Germany, but to a lesser extent.  Her surplus population already finds a considerable outlet in Argentina and South Brazil, among peoples, institutions, and language largely approximating to those left behind.  While Italy has, indeed need of a world policy as well as Germany, her ability to sustain a great part abroad cannot be compared to that of the Teutonic people.  Her claim is not so urgent; her need not so insistent, her might inadequate.

The honesty and integrity of the German mind, the strength of the German intellect, the skill of the German hand and brain, and justice and vigour of German law, the intensity of German culture, science, education and social development, these need a great and healthy field for their beneficial display, and the world needs these things more than it needs the British mastery of the seas.  The world of European life needs to-day, as it needed in the days of a decadent Roman Empire, the coming of another Goth, the coming of the Teuton.  The interposing island in the North Sea alone intervenes.  How to surmount that obstacle, how to win the freedom of the “Seven Seas” for Europe must be the supreme issue for Germany.

If she falls she is doomed to sterility.  The supreme test of German genius, of German daring, of German discipline and imagination lies there.

Where Louis XIV., the Directory, and Napoleon failed, will the heirs of Karl the Great see clearly?

And then, when that great hour has struck, will Germany, will Europe, produce the statesman soldier who shall see that the key to ocean freedom lies in that island beyond an island, whose very existence Europe has forgotten?

Till that key is out from the Pirate’s girdle, Germany may win a hundred “Austerlitzes” on the Vistula, the Dnieper, the Loire, but until she restores that key to Europe, to paraphrase Pitt, she may “roll up that map of the world; it will not be wanted these fifty years.”

Chapter V

THE PROBLEM OF THE NEAR WEST

The foregoing reflections and the arguments drawn from them were penned before the outbreak of the war between Turkey and the Balkan Allies.