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 role. 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,