peril which they believed menaced them in Europe. They made an alliance with Austria and Italy that was to provide them with help in case either France or Russia should attack them, for then Italy would attack France and Austria would attack Russia.1 Of course they also agreed that if Russia attacked Austria or France attacked Italy, they would help in their turn. But they were more concerned about themselves than they were about others. They built a great fleet of merchant ships so that goods going to Germany might not wait on the shore somewhere for transportation because the British refused to carry them in their ships. They then built a great navy literally to frighten the British and prevent them from closing the English Channel, the Mediterranean Sea, or the various ocean roads which the German ships followed.

They then concluded that a country to be great must have colonies. They had established long ago a few in Africa and some in the Pacific, but had failed to make money out of them, or to find them valuable customers. They must create a great colony which would provide not merely customers but also raw materials and which would not be open to attack from the sea. The British fleet was so large and so capable that the Germans were afraid they might never be able to defeat it. Hence they must locate their colony

1 This was the Triple Alliance, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, first made in 1883 and ruptured by Italy at the outbreak of the war in August, 1914, pursuant of reservations made by the Italians at the outset. It was followed by the Dual Alliance of France and Russia in 1892; by the AngloFrench Entente of 1904; and by the Triple Entente of France, Great Britain, and Russia of 1907. An alliance is a written engagement; an entente is an informal understanding, the vital portions of which are commonly verbal; the terms of an alliance are precise, those of an entente vague; the alliance binds the nations under certain conditions, the entente is subject to further agreement before it is operative. Neither term, Triple Alliance or Triple Entente, was used during the war period, for the former at once became something less and the latter something more.

in some place which they could reach by land and which the British could not reach by sea.

They selected Mesopotamia. There had been some of the greatest empires of history; there some of the wealthiest of peoples had lived; there should rise a New Germany. They thought that they might raise cotton, grow wool, and perhaps cultivate rubber. Petroleum existed there and copper they would find in the mountains. There too was room for millions of Germans to settle and create a community which would produce for sale in Germany what Germans wished to buy and which would buy from Germany what the latter made and wished to sell.

And it was out of the reach of the British fleet! The Germans themselves would reach it by means of the Bagdad Railroad. This would run from Berlin to Vienna, down through the mountains to Constantinople, and then through Asia Minor to Bagdad. It would provide them with transportation. But they must not forget to protect it. Bagdad was a long distance from Berlin and the railroad passed through many countries which the Germans did not control. The British fleet, too, might land troops in Syria, a very short distance from the railroad and Bagdad- and Berlin and the German army would be too far away to help. A new state must be created to protect the railroad and the new colony, a federated state created out of many states. Austria would be an all-important part; Turkey too must become an ally of Germany and a part of the new state, for the Turks owned the territory in which Mesopotamia was situated and most of the territory through which the railroad ran after leaving Germany and Austria. But there were two states between Austria and Turkey, Bulgaria, with whose king the Germans and Austrians easily made an alliance, and Serbia. But Serbia declined their offers. Pleading, urging, threatening failed. To control the section of the railroad that

ran through Serbia, Austria must seize Serbia itself. They must have Serbia. They must control Belgrade and the crossing of the Danube. So Serbians feared and hated Austria; so men could believe in 1914 that a Serbian would kill the Austrian Archduke.

These alliances and conquests once complete, a great empire would have been created, strong enough to be independent of Europe and of the rest of the world, strong enough perhaps to dominate the rest of the world without having to conquer it. For the Germans truthfully said that they would prefer not to be compelled to conquer the world in order to Germanize it. This great empire would also be able, they thought, to destroy the British Empire. A land attack on the Suez Canal would deprive the British of their connection by sea with India and Australia, and compel them to go around Africa. Meanwhile, the Germans themselves would proceed by land along the Persian Gulf, reach India first, and conquer it. They even thought that they might afterwards conquer the whole of Asia. This is the true Pan-Germanism. It began with an attempt to keep German those who left Germany and went to live in other countries like the United States; hence the name, AllGermans, meaning that all Germans in all parts of the world should stay together and coöperate with one another. But the plan grew from that quite simple idea into this vast scheme of world conquest and dominion.

CHAPTER III

THE LESSON OF PRUSSIAN HISTORY

It is quite as significant to see why the Germans felt that they could change the balance of power in the world as it is to appreciate the extent and meaning of the scheme itself. They meant in effect to deprive other nations, without their consent, of territory, of influence in the world, of the practical right to decide the conditions of life in their own countries. No conqueror of antiquity had ever attempted to accomplish so much. Not even the great Napoleon in more modern times sketched out such an ambitious plan. But the Germans were convinced that it was feasible and the fact which convinced them was nothing less than the history of Prussia.

There is no more dramatic story in the world's annals. A tiny state, surrounded by powerful and hostile neighbors, somehow survived them all, absorbed several of them, and succeeded in dominating northern Europe. The rapid rise of Prussia convinced the Germans that they might accomplish anything. Consequently Germany challenged the world itself in 1914 and held out for more than four years before she was beaten. The first troops who went to Belgium wrote with chalk on the doors of the railroad carriages, "William II, Emperor of the World.” There was the true German touch.

We have only to go back in imagination to a time when America was not yet discovered to see in northern Germany the tiny state of Brandenburg, so small and unimportant that it was conferred

by the Holy Roman Emperor upon a certain prince of Hohenzollern. This was in the thirteenth century and for four centuries the growth of this state was very gradual. Then, about the time when a good many English people came to New England and there began to be something resembling civilization here, the Great Elector (1640-1688) became the ruler of Brandenburg. A remarkable man with insight and executive ability, he analyzed the position of his state and its problems and defined Prussian policy for his successors. It was a small state, and because there was no more land, only a few people could live on it compared with the population of the neighboring hostile states. The soil was poor in quality, and as agriculture was then the main occupation of European countries the people themselves were poor. This small area of poor land was in the middle of a plain, no mountains surrounded it, no deep rivers protected it from invasion. Sweden and Poland on the north and east, Saxony and Austria on the south, France in the west were large, hostile, and aggressive.

To defend such a state, the Great Elector concluded every man must become a soldier and that the whole life of the country must be organized around the army. The entire physical force of the little state might conceivably defend it; its entire economic strength might sustain its army; nothing less could possibly suffice. The population was small and its resources relatively so inadequate that nothing but the most complete utilization of both could provide it with security.

The only real solution of the country's future was growth not in wisdom but in size. For even at that relatively remote period the beginning of Prussian national conceit was apparent. There must be more land, so that there might be more people, and more people so that there might be more soldiers in the army. More land meant more food for more soldiers and so it must go