regarded what German professors
expounded in their classrooms and German writers
set forth to the world as the goal of German
policy, as rather the dream of minds detached from
practical affairs, as preposterous private
conceptions of German destiny, than as the actual
plans of responsible rulers; but the rulers of
Germany themselves knew all the while what
concrete plans, what well-advanced intrigues lay
back of what the professors and the writers were
saying, and were glad to go forward unmolested,
filling the thrones of Balkan States with German
Princes, putting German officers at the service of
Turkey to drill her armies and make interest with
her Government, developing plans of sedition and
rebellion in India and Egypt, setting their fires
in Persia. The demands made by Austria upon Serbia
were a mere single step in a plan which compassed
Europe and Asia, from Berlin to Bagdad. They hoped
those demands might not arouse Europe, but they
meant to press them whether they did or not, for
they thought themselves ready for the final issue
of arms.

A TOOL OF GERMANY

Their plan was to throw a broad belt of German
military power and political control across the
very center of Europe and beyond the Mediterranean
into the heart of Asia; and Austria-Hungary was
to be as much their tool and pawn as Serbia or
Bulgaria or Turkey or the ponderous States of the
East. Austria-Hungary, indeed, was to become part
of the Central German Empire, absorbed and
dominated by the same forces and influences that
had originally cemented the German States
themselves. The dream had its heart at Berlin. It
could have had a heart nowhere else! It rejected
the idea of solidarity of race entirely. The
choice of peoples played no part in it at all. It
contemplated binding together racial and political
units which could be kept together only by
force--Czechs, Magyars, Croats, Serbs, Rumanians,
Turks, Armenians--the proud States of Bohemia and
Hungary, the stout little commonwealths of the
Balkans, the indomitable Turk