Prussia, grown in something like forty
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 exhausted body, but if so it will be only
with the intention of tearing away the long-coveted part of her
substance.
Pan-Germanism 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 organisation,
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.
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