The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎578r] (46/239)

AUTOCRACY AND WAR.
15
that she had parted with lots of solid substance in exchange for
a shadow. It is true that the shadow was indeed the mightiest,
the darkest that the modern world had ever known—and the most
overbearing. But it is fading now, and the tone of truest anxiety
as to what is to take its place will come, no doubt, from that and
no other direction; and no doubt, also, it will have that note of
generosity which even in the moments of greatest aberration is
seldom wanting in the voice of the French people
Two neighbours Russia will find at her door. Austria, tradition
ally unaggressive whenever her hand is not forced, ruled by a
dynasty of uncertain future, weakened by her duality, can only
speak to her m an uncertain, bi-lingual phrase. Prussia, grown
in something like sixty years from an almost pitiful dependant
into a bullying friend and evil-counsellor of Russia’s masters, may
indeed hasten to extend a strong hand to the weakness of her ex-
austed body, but, if so, it will be only with the intention of
tearing away the long-coveted part of her substance.
Pangermanism is by no means a shape of mists, and Germany is
anything but a Neant where thought and effort are likely to lose
themselves without sound or trace. It is a powerful and voracious
organism, full of unscrupulous self-confidence, whose appetite for
aggrandisement will only be limited by the power of helping itself
to the severed members of its friends and neighbours. The era of
wars so eloquently denounced by the old Republicans as the
peculiar blood-guilt of dynastic ambitions is by no means over yet
They will be fought out differently, with lesser frequency, with an
increased bitterness and the savage tooth-and-claw obstinacy of a
struggle for existence. They will make us regret the time of
dynastic ambitions, with their human absurdity moderated by
prudence and even by shame, by the fear of personal responsibility
and the regard paid to certain forms of conventional decency. For,
if the monarchs of Europe have been derided for addressing each
other as “ brother ” in autograph communications, that relation
ship was at least as effective as any form of brotherhood likely to be
established between the rival nations of this continent, which, we
are assured on all hands, is the heritage of democracy. In the
ceremonial brotherhood of monarchs the reality of blood ties
entered often for what little it is worth as a drag on unscrupulous
desires of glory or greed. Besides, there was always the common
danger of exasperated peoples, and some respect for each other’s
divine right. No leader of a democracy without other ancestry
but the sudden shout of a multitude, and debarred by the very con
dition of his power from even thinking of a direct heir, will have
any interest in calling brother the leader of another democracy—
a chief as fatherless and heirless as himself.