THE PERSONAL FACTOR

Europe then has still to reckon with the personal factor—­with all its vagaries and its desolating ambitions.  Let us see how this has worked in the case before us.  In 1888 the present German Emperor ascended the throne.  Two years afterwards, in March 1890, the Pilot was dropped—­Bismarck resigned.  The change was something more than a mere substitution of men like Caprivi and Hohenlohe for the Iron Chancellor.  There was involved a radical alteration in policy.  The Germany which was the ideal of Bismarck’s dreams was an exceedingly prosperous self-contained country, which should flourish mainly because it developed its internal industries as well as paid attention to its agriculture, and secured its somewhat perilous position in the centre of Europe by skilful diplomatic means of sowing dissension amongst its neighbours.  Thus Bismarck discouraged colonial extensions.  He thought they might weaken Germany.  On the other hand, he encouraged French colonial policy, because he thought it would divert the French from their preoccupation with the idea of revanche.  He played, more or less successfully, with England, sometimes tempting her with plausible suggestions that she should join the Teutonic Empires on the Continent, sometimes thwarting her aims by sowing dissensions between her and her nearest neighbour, France.  But there was one empire which, certainly, Bismarck dreaded not so much because she was actually of much importance, but because she might be.  That empire was Russia.  The last thing in the world Bismarck desired was precisely that approximation between France and Russia which ended in the strange phenomenon of an offensive and defensive alliance between a western republic and a semi-eastern despotic empire.

KAISER WILHELM

Kaiser Wilhelm II had very different ideals for Germany, and in many points he simply reversed the policy of Bismarck.  He began to develop the German colonial empire, and in order that it might be protected he did all in his power to encourage the formation of a large German navy.  He even allowed himself to say that “the future of Germany was on the sea.”  It was part of that peculiar form of personal autocracy which the Kaiser introduced that he should from time to time invent phrases suggestive of different principles of his policy.  Side by side with the assertion that Germany’s future was on the sea, we have the phrases “Germany wants her place in the sun” and that the “drag” of Teutonic development is “towards the East.”  The reality and imminence of “a yellow peril” was another of his devices for stimulating the efforts of his countrymen.  Thus the new policy was expansion, evolution as a world-power, colonisation; and each in turn brought him up against the older arrangement of European Powers.  His colonial policy, especially in Africa, led to collisions with both France and