ut in this war
there is no such common term. No one outside the districts led by
Prussia desires a Prussian life, and perhaps most, certainly many, of
those whom Prussia now leads are in different degrees unwilling to
continue a Prussian life. The fight, in a word, is not like a fight
with a man who, if he beats you, may make you sign away some property,
or make you acknowledge some principle to which you are already half
inclined; it is like a fight with a man who says, "So long as I have
life left in me, I will make it my business to kill you." And fights
of that kind can never reach a term less absolute than the destruction
of offensive power in one side or the other. A peace not affirming
complete victory in this great struggle could, of its nature, be no
more than a truce.

* * * * *

So much for the really important and the chief thing which we have to
understand--the general causes of the war.

Now let us turn to the particular causes. We shall find these to be,
not like the general causes, great spiritual attitudes, but, as they
always are, a sequence of restricted and recent _events_.

(5) THE PARTICULAR CAUSES OF THE WAR.

After the great victories of Prussia a generation ago (the spoliation
of Denmark in 1864, the supremacy established over Austria in 1866,
the crushing defeat of France and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine,
with two millions of people in 1870-1), Europe gradually drifted into
being an armed camp, the great forces of which were more or less in
equilibrium. Prussia had, for the moment at least, achieved all that
she desired. The French were for quite twenty years ardently desirous
of recovering what they had lost; but Europe would not allow the war
to be renewed, and Prussia, now at the head of a newly constituted
German Empire, made an arrangement with Austria and with Italy to curb
the French desire for recovery. The French, obviously inferior before
this triple alliance, gradually persuaded the Russians to support
them; but the Russians would not support the French in provoking
another great war, and with the French themselves the old feeling
gradually deadened. It did not disappear--any incident might have
revived it--but the anxious desire for immediate war when the
opportunity should come got less and less, and at the end of the
process, say towards 1904, when a new generation had grown up in all
the countries concerned, there was a sort of deadlock