The leading class is improvised, and the best of it goes into the army. At one time and another I have spent more than two months mainly in the company of Serbian officers, and I have the greatest respect for the intellectual and moral qualities of many of them as shown in their conversation. For their professional merits, the world can refer to their deeds in battle. Their popularity with their 'brother' soldiers, whom they command not on any system of caste, but as copartners in the national defense, recalls the French officers of the armies of the First Republic. There is no class division between them and the men they command, only a difference of education. You may see them dancing the kolo, the pretty national dance of interwoven steps, hand in hand with their men. When it comes to the charge, they say, not 'Forward, men,' but 'Let us charge, brothers.'

But after all, the private (infantryman) the peasant soldier, who has come from tilling his own farm-is the backbone of the Serbian army. It is the stout yeomen, free and equal brothers in arms, who drove an Austrian host of 400,000, twice as numerous as themselves, in headlong rout out of the Serbian soil, and captured all their artillery. That victory of the Serbians last December is the most thrilling feat of arms that this war has anywhere witnessed, as a triumph of the human spirit against material odds. It was a victory in which Washington or Garibaldi would have loved to take part. The Serbians won because they were freemen, accustomed to liberty at home, fighting to save their country from a host of war-slaves who spoke six different languages and were for the most part lukewarm or hostile to the cause in which they were compelled to fight. The patriotism of the Serbian surpasses the patriotism of any nation

engaged in this war. For they are free and equal at home, and they have no class divisions; there is no arrière pensée in their devotion to their country's cause. They have no politics except patriotism, no loyalty except to their country. There is no nation in Europe so much at one with itself and with its government.

But the Serbians have not always been at one with their government. They have sometimes had very bad and unpopular governments. Since the origin of the state a hundred years ago, under the hero Kara George and his wise successor Milosh Obrenovitch, this simple peasant community has on several occasions fallen into bad hands. It has had some very poor luck with its kings, though the present king and crown prince are both excellent. The worst kings of all reigned during the last part of the nineteenth century. They were Kings Milan and Alexander, who made their country the vassal of Austria, and at Austria's behest made an unprovoked attack on Bulgaria in 1885. That war was most unpopular with the mass of the Serbians, who therefore fought badly and got Serbia a very bad military reputation, which lasted until 1912. Finally King Alexander suspended the democratic constitution and set up a tyranny, and a very inefficient tyranny at that. The country was going to anarchy, and Alexander had to be dethroned. Unfortunately, instead of being decently dethroned, he was murdered in a peculiarly brutal manner in 1903. All that Europe knew about Serbia was the fact of this murder, and for long Europe judged Serbia by that alone.

This deficiency in the higher branches of government, natural to a peasant democracy, put Serbia back for a generation or more. She had begun her independent existence (in the northwest corner of her present territory)

sixty years before any part of Bulgaria was set free, and she ought therefore to have remained ahead in the race of progress. Yet at the close of the nineteenth century she dropped behind Bulgaria in education, in the arts of life, and in military proficiency. Bulgaria, though a peasant democracy like Serbia, had the great advantage of a group of leaders educated at the American Robert College, Constantinople. So Bulgaria, in the first generation of her independent existence, forged ahead, and from 1878 to 1913 every one courted Bulgaria and despised Serbia. The enemies of Turkish rule, like the British Balkan Committee, looked to the Bulgarian army to deliver the Balkan Christians, and scarcely visited Serbia. The Macedonians looked for deliverance to Sofia, not to Belgrade. To Europe in general the Serbians were an unknown race, dwelling somewhere in the interior of Eastern Europe. People forgot that the Serbians, under Kara George and Milosh Obrenovitch, had won their liberty from the Turk earlier and with less help from outside than Greeks, Roumanians, or Bulgars.

Yet during these years when they were held in such contempt, a remarkable national revival was going on. The present King Peter restored parliamentary government, and presided as a constitutional monarch over the resumed democratic life of the nation. M. Pashich, a man of high honor and ability, was chosen as the people's premier, and he has done almost as much for Serbia as M. Venizelos for Greece. Education and administration were greatly improved. Above all, the army was made efficient.

The change for the good was most rapid after 1908. In that year Austria proclaimed the formal annexation of the Serb province of Bosnia, which she had occupied for thirty years past. This

outrage on Serb race-feeling stung the Serbians to the quick, and from that moment they pulled themselves together and began to arm in real earnest. A national moral revival was observed by the very few who watched Serbia. But Turk, Bulgar, and Austrian despised Serbia too much to observe the change. And consequently in three successive years-1912, 1913, and 1914Turk, Bulgar, and Austrian have suffered most unexpected defeats at the hands of the Serbian army.

III

The Croat section of the South Slav race inhabits principally Dalmatia and Croatia. The Croats are practically the same in race and language as the Serbs, but differ in religion, being Roman Catholics. The movement for the political union of these two branches of the South Slav race has grown rapidly in the past few years, though it is still opposed by one party among the Croats, the party of M. Frank.

Prior to 1868 the various races of Austria-Hungary were ruled by the German-Austrians by the sword. In 1848 the Magyars of Hungary attempted to get free, under the leadership of Kossuth, but they were suppressed by Vienna. Their defeat was largely owing to the great Kossuth's great mistake in refusing to take the Roumanians, Slovaks, and South Slavs into partnership with the Magyars. Kossuth's policy of forcibly 'magyarizing' all these races of Hungary has become the permanent policy of the race of which he is the hero. Twenty years passed, and in 1868 the Austrians of Vienna found they could no longer rule their immense empire alone, and took the Magyars into partnership. Since then the German-Austrians and the Magyars have divided between them the government of the various races of

the Empire, South Slavs and Italians, and further north, Slovaks, Ruthenes, Poles, and Czechs. An empire so heterogeneous in race as Austria-Hungary must either be a despotism ruled by the sword, or a land of federal liberty. Since 1868 it has halted between these two paths, the Magyars pulling toward despotism, while the GermanAustrians showed some inclination toward liberalism in their treatment of the Poles. But the test case was the treatment of the South Slav race, part of which was in Hungary under the Magyars, part in Dalmatia under the Austrians, and part under their joint rule in Bosnia. Unfortunately in the past few years the Magyars have dragged Austria after them in the domestic policy of repression of South Slav national consciousness. The worst incidents of oppression have been the most recent. In 1908-09, the scandalous treason trial of Agram unjustly condemned a number of Croat leaders to prison. To justify this reign of terror, forged documents were published which had been procured by the Austrian Minister at Belgrade, Count Forgach. His crime was exposed in the Friedjung trial at Vienna, and by the work of Professor Massaryh, but he was not disgraced and became UnderSecretary for Foreign Affairs in Vienna. The exposure of the Austrian Dreyfus case made no difference to men or policy. It was this Count Forgach who recently had the face to accuse the Serbian government of connivance in the murder of the Archduke last summer.

In 1912 the Constitution of Croatia was suspended by arbitrary decree of the Hungarian Premier. This drew the Croatians nearer to the Serbs and made something of a working alliance between the two branches of the South Slav race. Since then the Austrians have followed the Magyar lead, and applied the military system of arrests

and terrorism to the Croats of Dalmatia. The Magyars, in the same year 1912, also abolished the constitution of the Serb Orthodox Church in Hungary and seized its funds, and a year later the Patriarch Bogdanovic committed suicide in despair.

IV

The present war was in its origin a 'punitive expedition' against the Serbians, for having the impudence to sympathize with their brother Serbs and Croats in Austria-Hungary. The expedition was to have been made in August, 1913, as Signor Giolitti recently revealed to the world, but owing to Italy's refusal to join in a war of aggression it was postponed for a year, until the murder of the Archduke by Austrian Serb subjects seemed a fitting opportunity to wipe independent Serbia off the map.

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There will be no peace in Europe until the subject populations of AustriaHungary obtain liberty in one form or another. The rule of the sword cannot give permanent peace. The terrorism existing in the South Slav provinces of Austria-Hungary since the war began is as bad as anything in the annals of oppression. The Austrians have recently driven scores of thousands of Bosnian Serb peasants-men, women, and children out of Bosnia into Montenegro, to starve or perish there. The leaders of the subject populations are in prison, or in exile, where I have met many of them; the young men are all under the dread surveillance of military discipline in the conscript army. It is because the young men are all drafted into the army the moment there is any sign of trouble, that there can be no revolution attempted in any part of Europe to-day. The modern militarist organization makes revolutions impossible. That is why Europe is in

very great danger of falling under a system of tyranny which will be far more impregnable to assault and far more pitiless to prayer than the tyrannies against which the peoples of Europe rebelled in 1848. We are told that the time for small states has gone by. But if the big empires that devour them deny all racial, cultural, and political liberty

within their borders, and turn all their subjects, irrespective of personal or racial differences, into so many pieces of a grinding military machine, then the extinction of little democracies like Serbia (and others elsewhere) would mean the extinction of human freedom and of all that is noblest in the spirit of man.

If the Germans are to be believed, their only implacable and unappeasable enmity in the war is against England.

Toward France they express a kind of brutal, contemptuous liking. As providing opportunities for military glory in 1870 and again last August, France has deserved well of the Fatherland. Toward Russia they have the tolerance of merely momentary hostility, with the consciousness that the grounds of quarrel are finite and capable of adjustment. But toward England they express a hatred which nothing can satisfy except the utter destruction of England's power. Portugal, Spain, Holland, were once great maritime and colonial empires, but they are fallen from their high estate; so England is to fall, if Germany in its present mood is to have its way.

This attitude is not confined to journalists or the thoughtless multitude; it is to be found equally in the deliberate writings of learned men. Very instructive from this point of view is an article by the historian Eduard Meyer,

in the Italian periodical Scientia, on England's war against Germany and the problems of the future.1 The erudite professor, following Mommsen, considers Germany as the analogue of Rome and England as the analogue of Carthage. He hardly hopes for a decisive victory now, but looks forward to a succession of conflicts like the Punic Wars, ending, we are to suppose, in an equally final triumph. 'Especially in America,' he says, 'but also in Europe, above all in the neutral countries, there are not a few well-meaning people who believe that this tremendous war will be the last for a long time to come, that a new era of peaceful development and of harmonious international peace will follow. I regard these views as a utopian dream. Their realization could be hoped for only in case we should succeed in really casting England to the ground, breaking her maritime dominion, and thereby conquering the freedom of the seas, and at the

1 'Englands Krieg gegen Deutschland und die Probleme der Zukunft'; March, 1915, pp. 286800.

same time in so controlling our other enemies that they would lose for ever the desire to attack us again. But so high our hopes can hardly rise; it seems far more probable that we shall have to be content with much less, even if we remain victorious to the end. But then, so far as one can foresee, this peace will only be a short truce; England will use the first opportunity of beginning the fight again, better prepared, at the head of a new coalition if not of the old one, and a long series of difficult and bloody wars will follow, until at last the definite decision is obtained.' He adds that modern civilization, from now on, is to decline, as ancient civilization declined; that the era of attempts at international friendship is definitely past, and that 'the characteristic of the next century will be unconquerable opposition and embittered hate between England and Germany.'

Very similar sentiments are expressed by English professors, except that their military hopes are less modest, and they expect to achieve in this war that crushing victory which, like Eduard Meyer, they regard as the only possible road to a permanent peace. They hope, at any rate, to crush German militarism, and Professor Meyer assures us that 'whoever intends to destroy German militarism must destroy the German nation.'

Are the professors of England and Germany in the right? Is it certain that these two nations will continue to fight and hate each other until one of them is utterly broken? Fortunately, no country consists wholly of professors, not even Germany; and it may be hoped that more sanity is to be found among those who have not been made mad by much learning. For the moment, both countries are wholly blind to their own faults, and utterly fantastic in the crimes which they attribute to the enemy. A vast but shadowy

economic conflict has been invented to rationalize their hostility, which in fact is as irrational and instinctive as that of dogs who snarl and fly at each other in the street. The cynic who said, 'Speech has been given us to conceal our thoughts,' might well have added, "Thought has been given us to conceal our passions from ourselves.' At least I am sure that this is true of thought in war-time.

In this article, I wish to examine, in a neutral spirit, the causes and supposed justifications of Anglo-German enmity, and to suggest ways by which it may be possible hereafter to avoid the appalling consequences contemplated by Professor Meyer.

The first thing that must strike any impartial observer of England and Germany in war-time is their amazing similarity in myth and melodrama. France and Russia each has its myth, for without myth no great national upheaval is possible. But their myths are different from ours, whereas the myths of England and Germany are all but identical. Each believes itself a great peace-loving nation, powerful, but always using its power to further worthy ends. Each believes that the other, with an incredible perfidy inspired by the basest jealousy, suddenly stirred up the war, after many years of careful preparation, military in the one case, diplomatic in the other. Each believes that only the utter humiliation of the other can secure the peace of the world and the ordered progress of civilization. In each, a pacifist minority urges moderation in the use of victory, while yielding to none in the conviction that victory is the indispensable preliminary to any future reconstruction. Each is absolutely confident of victory, and prepared for any sacrifice, however great, in order to secure victory. Each is quite unable to believe that the other is sincere in the opinion which it pro