of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Serajevo, the consequent Austrian ultimatum to Servia, the hasty and intemperate action of the Kaiser in forcing war, and—­from a more general point of view—­the particular form of militarism prevalent in Germany.  Ulterior antecedent conditions are to be found in the changing history of European States and their mutual relations in the last quarter of a century; the ambition of Germany to create an Imperial fleet; the ambition of Germany to have “a place in the sun” and become a large colonial power; the formation of a Triple Entente following on the formation of a Triple Alliance; the rivalry between Teuton and Slav; and the mutations of diplomacy and Real-politik.  It is not always possible to keep the two sets of causes, the recent and the ulterior, separate, for they naturally tend either to overlap or to interpenetrate one another.  German Militarism, for instance, is only a specific form of the general ambition of Germany, and the Austrian desire to avenge herself on Servia is a part of her secular animosity towards Slavdom and its protector, Russia.  Nor yet, when we are considering the present debacle of civilisation, need we interest ourselves overmuch in the immediate occasions and circumstances of the huge quarrel.  We want to know not how Europe flared into war, but why.  Our object is so to understand the present imbroglio as to prevent, if we can, the possibility for the future of any similar world-wide catastrophe.

EUROPEAN DICTATORS

Let us fix our attention on one or two salient points.  Europe has often been accustomed to watch with anxiety the rise of some potent arbiter of her destinies who seems to arrogate to himself a large personal dominion.  There was Philip II.  There was Louis XIV.  There was Napoleon a hundred years ago.  Then, a mere shadow of his great ancestor, there was Napoleon III.  Then, after the Franco-German war, there was Bismarck.  Now it is Kaiser Wilhelm II.  The emergence of some ambitious personality naturally makes Europe suspicious and watchful, and leads to the formation of leagues and confederations against him.  The only thing, however, which seems to have any power of real resistance to the potential tyrant is not the manoeuvring of diplomats, but the steady growth of democracy in Europe, which, in virtue of its character and principles, steadily objects to the despotism of any given individual, and the arbitrary designs of a personal will.  We had hoped that the spread of democracies in all European nations would progressively render dynastic wars an impossibility.  The peoples would cry out, we hoped, against being butchered to make a holiday for any latter-day Caesar.  But democracy is a slow growth, and exists in very varying degrees of strength in different parts of our continent.  Evidently it has not yet discovered its own power.  We have sadly to recognise that its range of influence and the new spirit which it seeks to introduce into the world are as yet impotent against the personal ascendancy of a monarch and the old conceptions of high politics.  European democracy is still too vague, too dispersed, too unorganised, to prevent the breaking out of a bloody international conflict.