e an effective part in the critical events of the
following years, and notably disabled her from checking the progress of
German and Austrian ascendancy in the Balkans. Above all it increased
the self-confidence of Germany, and inspired her rulers with the
dangerous conviction that the opposing forces with which they would
have to deal in the expected contest for the mastery of Europe could be
more easily overthrown than they had anticipated. To the Russian defeat
must be mainly attributed the blustering insolence of German policy
during the next ten years, and the boldness of the final challenge in
1914.

The third of the great empires was that of France, with 5,000,000
square miles of territory, mostly acquired in very recent years, but
having roots in the past. It rested upon a home population of only
39,000,000, but these belonged to the most enlightened, the most
inventive, and the most chivalrous stock in Christendom. As France had,
a hundred years before, raised the standard of human rights among the
European peoples, so she was now bringing law and justice and peace to
the backward peoples of Africa and the East; and was finding in the
pride of this achievement some consolation for the brutality with which
she had been hurled from the leadership of Europe.

The fourth of the great empires was America, with some 3,000,000 square
miles of territory, and a vague claim of suzerainty over the vast area
of Central and South America. Her difficult task of welding into a
nation masses of people of the most heterogeneous races had been made
yet more difficult by the enormous flood of immigrants, mainly from the
northern, eastern, and south-eastern parts of Europe, which had poured
into her cities during the last generation: they proved to be in many
ways more difficult to digest than their predecessors, and they tended,
in a dangerous way, to live apart and to organise themselves as
separate communities. The presence of these organised groups made it
sometimes hard for America to maintain a quite clear and distinctive
attitude in the discussions of the powers, most of which had, as it
were, definite bodies of advocates among her citizens; and it was
perhaps in part for this reason that she had tended to fall back again
to that attitude of aloofness towards the affairs of the non-American
world from which she seemed to have begun to depart in the later years
of the last century. Although she had herself taken a hand in t