and carry the world straightway into a new phase of human history. They
could but they do not. For alas! not one of them is free from the
entanglements of past things; when we look for the wisdom of statesmen
we find the cunning of politicians; when open speech and plain reason
might save the world, courts, bureaucrats, financiers and profiteers
conspire.




VII

THE FUTURE OF MONARCHY


From the very outset of this war it was manifest to the clear-headed
observer that only the complete victory of German imperialism could save
the dynastic system in Europe from the fate that it had challenged. That
curious system had been the natural and unplanned development of the
political complications of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Two
systems of monarchies, the Bourbon system and the German, then ruled
Europe between them. With the latter was associated the tradition of the
European unity under the Roman empire; all the Germanic monarchs had an
itch to be called Caesar. The Kaiser of the Austro-Hungarian empire and
the Czar had, so to speak, the prior claim to the title. The Prussian
king set up as a Caesar in 1871; Queen Victoria became the Caesar of
India (Kaisir-i-Hind) under the auspices of Lord Beaconsfield, and last
and least, that most detestable of all Coburgers, Ferdinand of Bulgaria,
gave Kaiserism a touch of quaint absurdity by setting up as Czar of
Bulgaria. The weakening of the Bourbon system by the French revolution