us to bring together the details of the struggle in a systematic connection, and thereby to shape it more effectively. At the same time it always remains a struggle against definite institutions and persons, as the bearers of definite social functions.
From the Marxian standpoint, therefore, one can at most say that the object of the struggle is not the punishment of the individuals against whom it is directed. Every man is merely the product of the conditions in which he grows up and lives. It is unjust to punish even the worst of criminals. The task of society is rather to take from him the possibility of doing further mischief, to make him, if possible, a useful, not a mischievous, member of society, and to remove those conditions which made him what he was and gave him the possibility and the power of doing harm.
And this is the position which a Marxist should take up towards the authors of the world-war. But it is by no means the Marxian doctrine that we should divert investigation from the guilty persons by dwelling on the impersonal guilt of Capitalism.
Marx and Engels never contented themselves with general disquisitions on the destructive effects of capital. They were just as much concerned with tracing out the working of particular institutions and parties, and their political leaders, such as Palmerston and Napoleon. To follow the same course in regard to those who brought about the world-war is not only our right, but our duty; and that not alone from a consideration of foreign but also of home politics, so that the return of the persons and institutions guilty of this fearful ruin shall be made for ever impossible.
CHAPTER II
THE ISOLATION OF GERMANY
It has been objected that the last days before the outbreak of war should not alone be considered in deciding the question as to where the guilt lies. We must, it is said, go further back, in order to discover how the contending elements were formed. In doing this, we shall find that imperialism, and the movement for extension of territory, characterized all the Great Powers, and not Germany alone.
Very true; but this movement of extension does not wholly explain the world-war, the peculiarity of which is that all the Great Powers and several of the smaller ones took part in it, and that all the world united itself against Germany. To show how this came about is the problem we have to deal with. The mere word “imperialism” does not take us any further.
The uprise of imperialism at the close of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century is marked by the fact that, far and wide, the Great Powers began to come into conflict with each other. First we had France with Italy, and then with England; America with Spain, and also with England; England with the Boers, with whom all the world sympathized; and, finally, Russia with Japan, behind whom England stood.
During that period Germany was the least affected by these international conflicts, which sometimes broke out in war.
Germany had, indeed, in 1871, committed the great mistake of tearing Alsace and Lorraine against their will from France, and thus driving France into the arms of Russia. The French passion for revanche, for reunion with their disruptured and enslaved brethren, began, in the course of time, to take a milder form; all the more as the prospects of the French in a war with Germany grew ever worse; for the population of France remained almost stationary, while that of Germany rapidly increased, and on this account alone the latter gained a constantly growing superiority over France. In 1866 the territory of what became later the German Empire numbered forty million inhabitants; that of France thirty-eight millions. In 1870 if France had had to do, as she hoped, with Prussia alone, her enemy would have numbered only twenty-four millions. But in 1910 the population of France was only thirty-nine millions, as against sixty-five millions in Germany.
Hence the alarm of France at the thought of a war with the overpowering strength of Germany—an alarm still evident in the conditions of the Peace of Versailles. Hence, also, the need of the alliance with Russia.
Through the hostility which prevailed between Germany and France, Russia, after 1871, felt herself in the position of arbitrator between the two, and therefore master of the whole of continental Europe. Trusting in that position, Russia ventured in 1877 to make war on Turkey, and found in the end that she was only checked in the exploitation of her victory by England and Austria. In the Berlin Congress of 1878 Bismarck had to decide between these Powers and Russia. He made himself independent of the Tsar and supported Austria and England.
From that date Russia turned away from Germany and established ever closer relations with France, so that Bismarck, in spite of his strong Russian sympathies, was ever more directed towards Austria. With Austria, in 1882, he associated Italy as an ally, when the French occupied Tunis, and thus deeply wounded the Italian imperialists who had been casting their eyes on that country.
England remained in “splendid isolation” outside of both combinations, but rather inclining to the Triple Alliance than towards the Russo-French Entente. Differences had arisen with France in connection with African aspirations (Morocco and more particularly Egypt, with the Sudan). In regard to Russia, her old hostility over the question of Turkey, and particularly of India, was continually finding fresh nourishment. On the other hand, England was always on friendly terms with Austria and Italy, and stood in no pronounced opposition to Germany, whose leader, Bismarck, had inflamed England's conflicts with Russia on the one hand, and with France on the other, in order to play between them the rôle of arbitrator and of the tertius gaudens. This was not, from the moral point of view, a very lofty policy, but it was a most fruitful one for the economic prosperity of Germany. It spared Germany all wars, at the very period of the uprise of imperialism, and enabled her to enlarge her industry, her commerce, and also her colonial possessions, by exploiting, without taking part in them, the imperialistic conflicts of the other Powers.
Thus we see that even in an epoch of imperialism it was possible for a Great Power to pursue another than a warlike policy. It is true that such a policy demanded statesmen with some stuff in their heads and with sufficient independence to assert themselves against those interested in an imperialistic policy of force. Nor were the latter more wanting in Germany than elsewhere; they were, in fact, strengthened by the success of the peace policy. The fabulous upgrowth of Germany in the economic sphere at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century provided the means for powerful military armaments, and it created a class of force-loving industrial magnates, particularly in the iron industry. With these associated themselves those old partisans of the policy of force, the Junkers, and the greater part of the intellectuals, who were professionally engaged to proclaim the warlike glory of the Hohenzollerns and to inoculate the whole youth of Germany with the virus of megalomania.
Bismarck's successor, Caprivi, pursued the old policy of maintaining peace amid all the imperialistic conflicts of the surrounding world. But when Prince Bülow, in 1897, became at first Foreign Minister, afterwards (1900) Chancellor, and with him Tirpitz became Chief of the Admiralty, we saw a completely new orientation of our foreign policy—the transition to a world-policy, which meant, if it meant anything at all, the establishment of the German domination of the world.
In the measure in which these tendencies came more and more into the light, they produced also a complete alteration in the attitude of the world towards Germany. Formerly the world was imperialistically divided, and Germany, on the principle, divide et impera, was the most powerful factor in it; henceforth all mutual opposition among the various States was absorbed in the one great mass of opposition to Germany, who seemed to threaten all of them.
The beginning of this fateful change in German world-policy is to be found in the Navy Bill
