The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe by Various
page 57 of 499 (11%)
page 57 of 499 (11%)
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from an economic standpoint. All these specious arguments on the
precipitating causes of the war can be but for the display of brilliant forensic oratory and matchless diction. Let us thrust aside in these dark moments of peril and horror all subterfuge. England, overburdened with taxation, was on the verge of civil war. Russia, whose masses were overridden roughshod by a bureaucracy weighting down the peasants with onerous national burdens, expected sooner or later the cataclysmic upheaval with which the Nihilistic societies have long been threatening its tyrannical Government. France, seriously financially embarrassed because of crop impoverishment and bad foreign investments in Brazil, Russia, and the Balkans, was subject to continued internal political upheavals, with ever-changing Ministries and a growing Socialist Party. Austria, "the ramshackle empire," was in danger of disintegrating from a variety of causes, not the least of which was the infusibility of its racially different elements. Germany, in a blind race for commercial supremacy, suffered from industrial overproduction, thus creating an unhealthy financial condition which fortified the Socialist Party to an extent which threatened her imperialistic form of government itself. So these monarchies whose days were numbered, because of dissatisfaction at the waste and extravagance of a world gone mad with national excesses committed in the name of civilization, in reality the price of our modernization, in a final desperate effort to rally their waning fortunes stampeded their awakening masses into a ruinous interracial war in order to stave off the torch and the guillotine. GEORGE E. BERNHEIMER. |
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