controlled its execution; and in the circumstances of the Prussian
Government must be sought the mainspring of the war. The cause of the
war was not the Serbian imbroglio nor even German rivalry with Russia,
France, or Britain. These were the occasions of its outbreak and
extension; but national rivalries always exist and occasions for war
are never wanting. They only result in war when one of the parties to
the dispute wants to break the peace; and the Prussian will-to-war was
due to the domestic situation of a Prussian government which had been
made by the sword and had realized before 1914 that it could not be
maintained without a further use of the sword. That government was the
work of Bismarck, who had been called to power in 1863 to save the
Hohenzollerns from subjection to Parliament and had found in the
Danish and Austrian wars of 1864 and 1866 the means of solving the
constitutional issue at Berlin. The cannon of Königgratz proved more
convincing than Liberal arguments; and the methods of blood and iron,
by which Bismarck, Moltke, and Roon conquered Denmark, Austria, and
France and annexed to Prussia the greater part of German soil,
impressed upon Germany a constitution in which the rule of the sword
was merely concealed behind a skilfully emasculated parliamentary
system. The Reichstag with its universal suffrage was the scabbard of
the Prussian sword, and it was because the sword could not do the work
required of it while it lay in the scabbard that it was drawn in 1914.

Since 1871 the object of every Prussian Government had been to
reconcile the German people to the veiled rule of the sword by
exhibiting results which, it was contended, could not otherwise have
been secured. Historians dwelt on the failure of the German Parliament
at Frankfurt to promote a national unity which was left for Prussian
arms to achieve, and philosophers deduced from that example a
comprehensive creed of might. More material arguments were provided