There is here no possibility of such a “draw” or “stalemate” as was the result, for instance, of the reduction of Louis XIV.’s ambition, or of the great revolutionary effort throughout Europe which ended with the fall of Napoleon.  Louis XIV.’s ambition cast over Europe, which received it favourably, the colour of French culture.  The Revolutionary Wars were fought for a principle which, if it did not appeal universally to men, appealed at least to all those millions whose instincts were democratic in every country.  But in this war there is no such common term.  No one outside the districts led by Prussia desires a Prussian life, and perhaps most, certainly many, of those whom Prussia now leads are in different degrees unwilling to continue a Prussian life.  The fight, in a word, is not like a fight with a man who, if he beats you, may make you sign away some property, or make you acknowledge some principle to which you are already half inclined; it is like a fight with a man who says, “So long as I have life left in me, I will make it my business to kill you.”  And fights of that kind can never reach a term less absolute than the destruction of offensive power in one side or the other.  A peace not affirming complete victory in this great struggle could, of its nature, be no more than a truce.

* * * * *

So much for the really important and the chief thing which we have to understand—­the general causes of the war.

Now let us turn to the particular causes.  We shall find these to be, not like the general causes, great spiritual attitudes, but, as they always are, a sequence of restricted and recent events.

(5) THE PARTICULAR CAUSES OF THE WAR.

After the great victories of Prussia a generation ago (the spoliation of Denmark in 1864, the supremacy established over Austria in 1866, the crushing defeat of France and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, with two millions of people in 1870-1), Europe gradually drifted into being an armed camp, the great forces of which were more or less in equilibrium.  Prussia had, for the moment at least, achieved all that she desired.  The French were for quite twenty years ardently desirous of recovering what they had lost; but Europe would not allow the war to be renewed, and Prussia, now at the head of a newly constituted German Empire, made an arrangement with Austria and with Italy to curb the French desire for recovery.  The French, obviously inferior before this triple alliance, gradually persuaded the Russians to support them; but the Russians would not support the French in provoking another great war, and with the French themselves the old feeling gradually deadened.  It did not disappear—­any incident might have revived it—­but the anxious desire for immediate war when the opportunity should come got less and less, and at the end of the process, say towards 1904, when a new generation had grown up in all the countries concerned, there was a sort of deadlock, every one very heavily armed, the principal antagonists, France and Germany, armed to their utmost, but the European States, as a whole, unwilling to allow any one of them to break the peace.