nevitably would soon lead to
war. In the Balkans, especially in Serbia, Russia was pursuing a
cynical and shameless policy of corruption, nourishing and exciting
every ferment of revolt against Austria-Hungary. Russian policy in
Serbia was really criminal. Everyone in Germany was convinced that
Russia was preparing for war. The Tsar's pacificist ideas were of no
importance whatever. In absolute monarchies it is an illusion to think
that the sovereign, though apparently an autocrat, acts in accordance
with his own views. His views are almost invariably those of the
people round him; he does not even receive news in its true form, but
in the form given it by officials. Russia was an unwieldy giant who
had shown signs of madness long before the actual revolution. It
is impossible that a collective madness such as that which has had
possession of Russia for three years could be produced on the spur of
the moment; the regime of autocracy contained in itself the germs
of Bolshevism and violence. Bolshevism cannot properly be judged by
Western notions; it is not a revolutionary movement of the people; it
is, as I have said before, the religious fanaticism of the Eastern
Orthodox rising from the dead body of Tsarist despotism. Bolshevism,
centralizing and bureaucratic, follows the same lines as the imperial
policy of almost every Tsar.

Undoubtedly the greatest responsibility for the War lies on Germany.
If it has not to bear all the responsibility, as the treaties claim,
it has to bear the largest share; and the responsibility lies, rather
than on the shoulders of the Emperor and the quite ordinary men
who surrounded him, on those of the military caste and some great
industrial groups. The crazy writings of General von Bernhardi and
other scandalous publications of the same sort expressed, more than
just theoretical views, the real hopes and tendencies of the whole
military caste. It is true enough that there existed in Germany a real
democratic society under the control of the civil government, but
there was the military caste too, with privileges in social life and a
special position in the life of the State. This caste was educated in
the conception of violence as the means of power and grandeur. When a
country has allowed the military and social theories of General von
Bernhardi and the senselessly criminal pronouncements of the Emperor
William II to prevail for so many years, it has put the most
formidable weapons possib