Prussia from the councils of Germany; for, as I have already said, it will not be enough simply to eliminate the House of Hohenzollern. As long as Prussia is dominant in the councils of Germany, its one industry, as Mirabeau said over a century ago, will be war. It matters not what the form of government is, as long as the Junkers and the Potsdam militarists control the destinies of Prussia.

If the Kaiser and his dynasty were deposed tomorrow and if the Empire became a republic in name, and Prussia still remained the dominant State of Germany, with a Hindenburg, a Ludendorff, or a Von Tirpitz as its executive head, it would still remain a menace to the peace and welfare of the world.

President Wilson goes to the root of the evil when he proclaims his purpose and that of his nation to put it beyond the power of Prussia again to plunge the world into such a catastrophe. While he has wisely refrained from pursuing his argument from the abstract proposition that no military power should have the ability to impose war at will upon the world to the concrete conclusion that the power of Prussia must be destroyed in the councils of Germany, yet the latter is a logical result to which, at a fitting time, it may be hoped that he will give due expression.

One word from the United States and the great expiation will be accomplished and Prussia will be reduced to a petty principality. No one can question that France would support such an attempt, and the support of Great Britain is equally probable. These three nations can and will dictate the terms of peace. The work should be a complete one; nothing should be left for future regrets. Let them put the axe to the very root of the great evil that now endangers the world by destroying the Prussian despotism, root and branch.

When that is done, civilization will again flower as the fair garden that it once was.

CHAPTER V

THE WORLD DRAMA

SOME of my readers, especially those who believe only in the realpolitik, may take exception to the reasoning of my argument, on the ground that it is too imaginary, sentimental, and dramatic for practical statecraft. It may be suggested that nations cannot, except as a figure of speech, be regarded as human personalities and credited with human emotions, obligations, and rights. It may be suggested that nations are the aggregate of vast impersonal forces which move somewhat as the blind forces of nature and which are equally remote from those moral and human considerations that define the duties and control the destinies of a human being.

This was the fundamental error of Germany. It was the realpolitik of Bismarck that corrupted a nation, which in the great days of the war for liberation, had been a nation of humanitarianism and sentiment. The Iron Chancellor, in the most

famous speech of his life, in 1863, denounced all sentimentality in politics. To him, democracy was a "blubbering sentimentality" and he found "Prussia's honour in Prussia's abstinence from every shameful union with democracy." The reasonings of morality had in his mind no application whatever to the duties of practical statecraft. The rights of the people were equally irrelevant. "Not by speeches and majority votes are the great questions of the day decided-that was the great blunder of 1848-49—but by blood and iron."

This was his most notable declaration. No one except Frederick the Base ever so deeply impressed upon his nation this policy of avowed and shameless immorality as did Bismarck. Except on occasion, he did not even pay to virtue the tribute of hypocrisy. He avowed with a certain exultance his betrayal of his own king in garbling and perverting the Ems dispatch, and this shameless cynicism so corrupted the intellectuals of Germany that Dr. Delbrück, who was not only a scholar but a philosopher, said: "Blessed be the hand that forged the telegram of Ems.”

Probably no single instance in Bismarck's career exemplified his Machiavellian policy more than his treatment of his ally and confederate, Austria, in the matter of Schleswig-Holstein. For centuries,

these two duchies had been united with Denmark, and her title to them was as clear as the title of any country to a territorial possession Although Prussia was far more powerful than Denmark, Bismarck, playing the part of a ruthless bully, determined to secure the co-operation of Austria in robbing Denmark of the two duchies, and then determined to rob Austria of her share of the spoils.

The two robber nations made war upon Denmark, and naturally won an easy victory. Then they quarreled over the spoils, just as the two giants in the Ring of the Nibelungen, Fafner and Fasolt, quarreled about the price which was paid to them for constructing Valhalla.

As soon as the two duchies were detached from Denmark, Bismarck picked a quarrel with Austria, and in seven weeks crushed that nation at Sadowa, although, as has been previously stated, Austria had in that warfare the support of nearly every German State, with the exception of Prussia. Prussia then proceeded, not merely to rob her confederate of any share of the Danish duchies but to annex the Kingdom of Hanover, the Duchies of Nassau and Hesse-Cassel, and the free city of Frankfort.

Here was practical politics, and if it be said that any theory as to the rule of justice or of the higher