Russia served as a natural base for Germany, taking German manufactures
and offering to Germany a reservoir capable of absorbing her redundant
population. Thus it had long been obvious that intimate relations with
Russia were of prime importance to Germany since all the world could
perceive that the monied interests of Russia must more and more fall into
German hands, because of the intellectual limitations of the Russians.
Also pacification to the eastward always was an integral part of
Bismarck's policy. Notwithstanding which other influences conflicted with,
and ultimately overbalanced, this eastern trend in Germany.

For many thousand years before written history began, the economic capital
of the world, the seat for the time being of opulence and of splendor, and
at once the admiration and the envy of less favored rivals, has been a
certain ambulatory spot upon the earth's surface, at a point where the
lines of trade from east to west have converged. And always the marked
idiosyncrasy of this spot has been its unrest. It has constantly
oscillated from east to west according as the fortunes of war have
prevailed, or as the march of applied science has made one or another
route of transportation cheaper or more defensible.

Thus Babylon was conquered and robbed by Rome, and Rome, after a long
heyday of prosperity, yielded to Constantinople, while Constantinople lost
her supremacy to Venice, Genoa, and North Italy, following the sack of
Constantinople by the Venetians in 1202 A.D. The Fairs of Champaign in
France, and the cities of the Rhine and Antwerp were the glory of the
Middle Ages, but these great markets faded when the discovery of the long
sea voyage to India threw the route by the Red Sea and Cairo into
eccentricity, and caused Spain and Portugal to bloom. Spain's prosperity
did not, however, last long. England used war during the sixteenth century
as an economic weapon, pretty easily conquering. And since the opening of