introduce into the world are as yet impotent against the personal
ascendancy of a monarch and the old conceptions of high politics. European
democracy is still too vague, too dispersed, too unorganised, to prevent
the breaking out of a bloody international conflict.


THE PERSONAL FACTOR

Europe then has still to reckon with the personal factor--with all its
vagaries and its desolating ambitions. Let us see how this has worked in
the case before us. In 1888 the present German Emperor ascended the
throne. Two years afterwards, in March 1890, the Pilot was
dropped--Bismarck resigned. The change was something more than a mere
substitution of men like Caprivi and Hohenlohe for the Iron Chancellor.
There was involved a radical alteration in policy. The Germany which was
the ideal of Bismarck's dreams was an exceedingly prosperous
self-contained country, which should flourish mainly because it developed
its internal industries as well as paid attention to its agriculture, and
secured its somewhat perilous position in the centre of Europe by skilful
diplomatic means of sowing dissension amongst its neighbours. Thus
Bismarck discouraged colonial extensions. He thought they might weaken
Germany. On the other hand, he encouraged French colonial policy, because
he thought it would divert the French from their preoccupation with the
idea of _revanche_. He played, more or less successfully, with England,
sometimes tempting her with plausible suggestions that she should join the
Teutonic Empires on the Continent, sometimes thwarting her aims by sowing
dissensions between her and her nearest neighbour, France. But there was
one empire which, certainly, Bismarck dreaded not so much because she was
actually of much importance, but because she might be. That empire was
Russia. The last thing in the world Bismarck desired was precisely that