A General Sketch of the European War | Page 9

Mahomedans even, and I have already mentioned the
numerous Jewish population of the north-east, particularly in Galicia.
The true principle of unity in what has hitherto been the
Austro-Hungarian Empire is twofold. It consists, first, in the reigning
family, considerable personal attachment to which is felt in every
section of its dominions, utterly different as these are one from another;
and, secondly (a more important point), in the historical development
of the State.
It is this last matter which explains all, and which can make us
understand why a realm so astonishingly ill constructed was brought

into the present struggle as one force, and that force a force allied to,
and in a military sense identical with, modern Prussian Germany.
For the historical root of Austria-Hungary is German. Of its population
(some fifty-one millions) you may say that only about a quarter are
German-speaking (less than another quarter are Magyar-speaking, most
of the rest Slavonic in speech, together with some proportion of
Roumanian and Italian).
But it is from this German quarter and from the emperor at their head
that the historical growth of the State depends, because this German
quarter was the original Christian nucleus and the civilized centre,
which had for its mission the reduction of Slavonic and Magyar
barbarism. The Slavs of the Bohemian quadrilateral were subjected, not
indeed by conquest, but by a process of culture, to Vienna. The crown
of Hungary, when it fell by marriage to the Hapsburgs, continued that
tradition; and when the Empress Maria-Theresa, in the last century,
participated in the abominable crime of Frederick the Great of Prussia,
and took her share of the dismembered body of Poland (now called the
Austrian province of Galicia), that enormous blunder was, in its turn, a
German blunder undertaken under the example of Northern Germany,
and as part of a movement German in spirit and origin. The same is
true even of the very latest of the Austrian developments, the
annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The act was that of Vienna, but
the spirit behind it, perhaps the suggestion of it, and the support that
made it possible came from Berlin.
In a word, if you could interrogate the Genius of the Hapsburgs and ask
it for what their dominion stood, it would tell you that for uninterrupted
centuries they had stood for the German effort to repress or to
overcome pressure upon the German peoples from the East. And that is
still their rôle. They have come into this war, for instance, as the
servants of Prussia, not because Prussia threatened or overawed them,
but because they felt they had, in common with Prussia, the mission of
withstanding the Slav, or of tolerating the Slav only as a subject;
because, that is, they feared, and were determined to resist, Russia, and
the smaller Slavonic States, notably Servia to the south, which are in

the retinue of Russia.
* * * * *
We may sum up, then, and say that the fundamental conflict of wills in
Europe, which has produced this general war, is a conflict between the
German will, organized by Prussia to overthrow the ancient Christian
tradition of Europe (to her advantage directly; and indirectly, as she
proposes, to the advantage of a supposedly necessary German
governance of the world under Prussian organization), and the will of
the more ancient and better founded Western and Latin tradition to
which the sanctity of separate national units profoundly appeals, and a
great deal more which is, in their eyes, civilization. In this conflict,
Prussia has called upon and received the support of not only the
German Empire, which she controls, but also the Hapsburg monarchy,
controlling the organized forces of Austria-Hungary; while there has
appeared against this strange Prussian claim all that values the
Christian tradition of Europe, and in particular the doctrine of national
freedom, with very much else--which very much else are the things by
which we of the civilized West and South, who have hitherto proved
the creators of the European world, live and have our being. Allied with
us, by the accident that this same German claim threatens them also, is
the young new world of the Slavs.
It is at this final point of our examination that we may see the
immensity of the issues upon which the war turns. The two parties are
really fighting for their lives; that in Europe which is arrayed against
the Germanic alliance would not care to live if it should fail to maintain
itself against the threat of that alliance. It is for them life and death. On
the other side, the Germans having propounded this theory of theirs, or
rather the Prussians having propounded it for them, there is no rest
possible until they shall either have "made good" to our destruction,