It was Witte who was sent to Berlin to protest against these proposed treaties and secure more favorable terms.  Witte made his protest and refused to accept the German demands.  Then suddenly he received peremptory orders from the Czar to grant all the demands of Germany.  The Czar declared Russia was in no condition to have trouble with Germany.  These commercial treaties expire within two years.  Russia many months back proposed the discussion of new terms.  Germany responded that the present treaties were satisfactory to her and he should call for their renewal.

This meant either further humiliation to Russia or war.  Russia had already suffered the affront of being forced by Germany at the point of the bayonet to assent to the taking by Austria of Bosnia and Herzegovina in violation of the Treaty of Berlin.  The Czar realized many months ago that Russia must now fight for her commercial life.  She would not, however, be ready for the war until 1916.

Let Americans consider what this means—­a German war over commercial tariffs—­and see what, if successful in Europe, it would lead to.

The German nation is a fighting unit under the dominion of Prussia, the greatest war state, not only of the empire, but of the world.  Having welded Germany by the Franco-Prussian war into a nation with unified tariffs, transportation, currency, and monetary systems, Prussia has been able to point to the war as the cause of the phenomenal prosperity of Germany.

It is a popular fallacy in Germany that militarism makes the greatness of a nation.  Germany’s prosperity did not begin with the war of 1870.  This was only the beginning of German unity which made possible unified transportation and later unified finances and tariffs.  Several years after the war, France, which had paid an indemnity to Germany of a thousand million dollars, or five billion francs, was found, to the astonishment of Bismarck, more prosperous than Germany which had thus received the expenses of her military campaign and a dot of Spandau Tower war-reserve moneys.

In 1875 came the great Reichsbank Act, which consolidated all the banking power of the empire.  Then came her scientific tariffs which put up the bars here, and let them down there, according as Germany needed export or import trade in any quarter of the earth.  The German people, on a soil poorer than that of France, worked hard and long hours for small wages.  But they worked scientifically and under the most intelligent protective tariff the world has ever seen.  In a generation they built up a foreign trade surpassing that of the United States and reaching $4,500,000,000 per annum.  By her rate of progress she was on the way to distance England, whose ports and business were open to her merchants without even the full English income tax.  She built the biggest passenger steamers ever conceived of and reached for the freight carrying trade of the world.  She mined in coal and iron and built solidly of brick and stone.  She put the world under tribute to her cheap and scientific chemistry.  She dug from great depths the only potash mines in the world and from half this potash she fertilized her soil until it laughed with abundant harvests.