m. The only thing, however, which
seems to have any power of real resistance to the potential tyrant is not
the manoeuvring of diplomats, but the steady growth of democracy in
Europe, which, in virtue of its character and principles, steadily objects
to the despotism of any given individual, and the arbitrary designs of a
personal will. We had hoped that the spread of democracies in all European
nations would progressively render dynastic wars an impossibility. The
peoples would cry out, we hoped, against being butchered to make a holiday
for any latter-day Caesar. But democracy is a slow growth, and exists in
very varying degrees of strength in different parts of our continent.
Evidently it has not yet discovered its own power. We have sadly to
recognise that its range of influence and the new spirit which it seeks to
introduce into the world are as yet impotent against the personal
ascendancy of a monarch and the old conceptions of high politics. European
democracy is still too vague, too dispersed, too unorganised, to prevent
the breaking out of a bloody international conflict.

THE PERSONAL FACTOR

Europe then has still to reckon with the personal factor--with all its
vagaries and its desolating ambitions. Let us see how this has worked in
the case before us. In 1888 the present German Emperor ascended the
throne. Two years afterwards, in March 1890, the Pilot was
dropped--Bismarck resigned. The change was something more than a mere
substitution of men like Caprivi and Hohenlohe for the Iron Chancellor.
There was involved a radical alteration in policy. The Germany which was
the ideal of Bismarck's dreams was an exceedingly prosperous
self-contained country, which should flourish mainly because it developed
its internal industries as well as paid attention to its agriculture, and
secured its somewhat perilous position in the centre of Europe by skilful
diplomatic means of sowing dissension amongst its neighbours. Thus
Bismarck discouraged colonial extensions. He thought they might weaken
Germany. On the other hand, he encouraged French colonial policy, because
he thought it would divert the French from their preoccupation with the
idea of _revanche_. He played, more or less successfully, with England,
sometimes tempting her with plausible suggestions that she should join the
Teutonic Empires on the Continent, sometimes thwarting her aims by sowing
dissensions between her and her nearest neighbour, France. But ther