we discover that nations may possibly refer to arbitration points of small
importance in their quarrels, but that the greater things which are
supposed to touch national honour and the preservation of national life
are tacitly, if not formally, exempted from the category of arbitrable
disputes. Diplomacy, Arbitration, Palaces of Peace seem equally useless.


PROXIMATE AND ULTIMATE CAUSES

In attempting to understand how Europe has (to use Lord Rosebery's phrase)
"rattled into barbarism" in the uncompromising fashion which we see
before our eyes, we must distinguish between recent operative causes and
those more slowly evolving antecedent conditions which play a
considerable, though not necessarily an obvious part in the result. Recent
operative causes are such things as the murder of the Archduke Franz
Ferdinand at Serajevo, the consequent Austrian ultimatum to Servia, the
hasty and intemperate action of the Kaiser in forcing war, and--from a
more general point of view--the particular form of militarism prevalent in
Germany. Ulterior antecedent conditions are to be found in the changing
history of European States and their mutual relations in the last quarter
of a century; the ambition of Germany to create an Imperial fleet; the
ambition of Germany to have "a place in the sun" and become a large
colonial power; the formation of a Triple Entente following on the
formation of a Triple Alliance; the rivalry between Teuton and Slav; and
the mutations of diplomacy and _Real-politik_. It is not always possible
to keep the two sets of causes, the recent and the ulterior, separate, for
they naturally tend either to overlap or to interpenetrate one another.
German Militarism, for instance, is only a specific form of the general
ambition of Germany, and the Austrian desire to avenge herself on Servia
is a part of her secular animosity towards Slavdom and its protector,