(5) THE PARTICULAR CAUSES OF THE WAR.

After the great victories of Prussia a generation ago (the spoliation
of Denmark in 1864, the supremacy established over Austria in 1866,
the crushing defeat of France and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine,
with two millions of people in 1870-1), Europe gradually drifted into
being an armed camp, the great forces of which were more or less in
equilibrium. Prussia had, for the moment at least, achieved all that
she desired. The French were for quite twenty years ardently desirous
of recovering what they had lost; but Europe would not allow the war
to be renewed, and Prussia, now at the head of a newly constituted
German Empire, made an arrangement with Austria and with Italy to curb
the French desire for recovery. The French, obviously inferior before
this triple alliance, gradually persuaded the Russians to support
them; but the Russians would not support the French in provoking
another great war, and with the French themselves the old feeling
gradually deadened. It did not disappear--any incident might have
revived it--but the anxious desire for immediate war when the
opportunity should come got less and less, and at the end of the
process, say towards 1904, when a new generation had grown up in all
the countries concerned, there was a sort of deadlock, every one very
heavily armed, the principal antagonists, France and Germany, armed
to their utmost, but the European States, as a whole, unwilling to
allow any one of them to break the peace.

It was about this moment that Prussia committed what the future
historian will regard, very probably, as the capital blunder in her
long career of success. She began to build a great fleet. Here the
reader should note two very important consequences of the great
Prussian victories which had taken place a generation before. The