A Short History of the Great War | Page 3

and in the circumstances of the Prussian
Government must be sought the mainspring of the war. The cause of
the war was not the Serbian imbroglio nor even German rivalry with
Russia, France, or Britain. These were the occasions of its outbreak and
extension; but national rivalries always exist and occasions for war are
never wanting. They only result in war when one of the parties to the
dispute wants to break the peace; and the Prussian will-to-war was due
to the domestic situation of a Prussian government which had been
made by the sword and had realized before 1914 that it could not be
maintained without a further use of the sword. That government was
the work of Bismarck, who had been called to power in 1863 to save
the Hohenzollerns from subjection to Parliament and had found in the
Danish and Austrian wars of 1864 and 1866 the means of solving the
constitutional issue at Berlin. The cannon of Königgratz proved more
convincing than Liberal arguments; and the methods of blood and iron,
by which Bismarck, Moltke, and Roon conquered Denmark, Austria,
and France and annexed to Prussia the greater part of German soil,
impressed upon Germany a constitution in which the rule of the sword
was merely concealed behind a skilfully emasculated parliamentary
system. The Reichstag with its universal suffrage was the scabbard of
the Prussian sword, and it was because the sword could not do the work
required of it while it lay in the scabbard that it was drawn in 1914.
Since 1871 the object of every Prussian Government had been to
reconcile the German people to the veiled rule of the sword by
exhibiting results which, it was contended, could not otherwise have
been secured. Historians dwelt on the failure of the German Parliament
at Frankfurt to promote a national unity which was left for Prussian
arms to achieve, and philosophers deduced from that example a
comprehensive creed of might. More material arguments were provided
for the man in business and in the street by the skilful activities of the
Government in promoting trade, industry, and social welfare; and the
wealth, which would in any case have accrued from the removal of the

tariff-walls and other barriers between the thirty-nine independent
States of Germany, was credited to the particular method of war by
which the unification had been accomplished. No State had hitherto
made such economic progress as did the German Empire in the
generation after Metz and Sedan, and the success of their rulers led
most of the German people to place implicit reliance on the testimony
those rulers bore to the virtue of their means. The means did not,
however, commend themselves to the rest of the world with equal
conviction; and an increasing aversion to the mailed fist on the part of
other countries led to what Germans called the hostile encirclement of
their Fatherland. Gradually it became clearer that Prussian autocracy
could not reproduce in the sphere of world-ambitions the success which
had attended it in Germany unless it could reduce the world to the same
submission by the use of similar arguments.
But still the Prussian Government was driven towards imperialistic
expansion by the ever-increasing force of public opinion and popular
discontent. It could only purchase renewed leases of autocratic power at
home, with its perquisites for those who wielded and supported
autocracy, by feeding the minds of the people with diplomatic triumphs
and their bodies with new markets for commercial and industrial
expansion; and the incidents of military domination grew ever more
irksome to the populace. The middle classes were fairly content, and
the parties which represented them in the Reichstag offered no real
opposition to Prussian ideas of government. But the Social Democrats
were more radical in their principles and were regarded by Prussian
statesmen as open enemies of the Prussian State. Rather than submit to
social democracy Prussians avowed their intention of making war, and
war abroad would serve their turn a great deal better than civil strife.
The hour was rapidly advancing two years before the war broke out.
The German rebuff over Agadir in 1911 was followed by a general
election in 1912 at which the Social Democrats polled nearly a third of
the votes and secured by far the largest representation of any party in
the Reichstag. In 1913, after a particularly violent expression of
militarism called "the Zabern incident," the Reichstag summoned up
courage for the first time in its history to pass a vote of censure on the
Government. The ground was slipping from under the feet of Prussian

militarism; it must either fortify its position by fresh victories or take
the risk of revolution. It preferred the chances of European war, and
found in the Serbian incident a means of provoking a