ffer the metal in the open
market. There is nothing to prevent a German merchant entering that
market and purchasing, unless Italy forbids all export of copper,
which it is perfectly free not to do.

To leave this side question of blockade, and to return to the relative
advantages and disadvantages of our enemy's central position, we may
repeat as a summary of its disadvantages the single truth that it
compels our enemy to fight upon two fronts.

All the rest is advantage.

It is an advantage that Germany and Austria-Hungary, as a corollary to
their common central position, are in some part of similar race and
altogether of a common historical experience. For more than a hundred
years every part of the area dominated by the Germanic body--with the
exception of Bosnia and Alsace-Lorraine--has had a fairly intimate
acquaintance with the other part. The Magyars of Hungary, the Poles of
Galicia, of Posen, of Thorn, the Croats of the Adriatic border, the
Czechs of Bohemia, have nothing in race or language in common with
German-speaking Vienna or German-speaking Berlin. But they have the
experience of generations uniting them with Vienna and with Berlin.
In administration, and to some extent in social life, a common
atmosphere spreads over this area, nearly all of which, as I have
said, has had something in common for a hundred years, and much of
which has had something in common for a thousand.

In a word, as compared with the Allies, the Germanic central body in
Europe has a certain advantage of moral homogeneity, especially as the
governing body throughout is German-speaking and German in feeling.

That is the first point of advantage--a moral one.

The second is more material. The Governments of the two countries,
their means of communication and of supply, are all in touch one with
another. Those governments are working in one field within a ring
fence, and working for a common object. They are not only spiritually
in touch; they are physically in touch. An administrator in Berlin can
take the night express after dinner and breakfast with his
collaborator in Vienna the next morning.

It so happens, also, that the communications of the two Germanic
empires are exactly suited to their central position. There is
sufficient fast communication from north to south to serve all the
purposes necessary to the intellectual conduct of a war; there is a
most admirable communication from east to west for the material
conduct