My Mission to London 1912-1914 Part 6

After two years' fighting it is obvious that we dare not hope for an unconditional victory over the Russians, English, French, Italians, Rumanians, and Americans, or reckon on being able to wear our enemies down. But we can obtain a peace by compromise only by evacuating the occupied territory, the retention of which would in any event be a burden and cause of weakness to us, and would involve the menace of further wars. Therefore everything should be avoided which would make it more difficult for those enemy groups who might possibly still be won over to the idea of a peace by compromise to come to terms, viz., the British Radicals and the Russian Reactionaries. From this point of view alone the Polish scheme is to be condemned, as is also any infringement of Belgian rights, or the execution of British citizens--to say nothing of the insane U-boat plan.

"Our future lies on the water." Quite right; therefore it is not in Poland and Belgium, in France and Serbia. This is a return to the days of the Holy Roman Empire and the mistakes of the Hohenstaufens and Habsburgs. It is the policy of the Plantagenets, not that of Drake and Raleigh, Nelson and Rhodes. The policy of the Triple Alliance is a return to the past, a turning aside from the future, from imperialism and a world-policy. "Middle Europe" belongs to the Middle Ages, Berlin-Bagdad is a blind alley and not the way into the open country, to unlimited possibilities, to the world-mission of the German nation.

I am no enemy of Austria, or Hungary, or Italy, or Serbia, or any other state, but only of the Triple Alliance policy, which was bound to divert us from our aims and bring us onto the inclined plane of a Continental policy. It was not the German policy, but that of the Austrian Imperial House. The Austrians had come to regard the Alliance as an umbrella under the shelter of which they could make excursions to the Near East when they thought fit.

And what must we expect as the result of this war of nations? The United States of Africa will be British, like those of America, Australia and Oceania. And the Latin states of Europe, as I predicted years ago, will enter into the same relations with the United Kingdom that their Latin sisters in America maintain with the United States. The Anglo-Saxon will dominate them. France, exhausted by the war, will only attach herself still more closely to Great Britain. Nor will Spain continue to resist for long.

And in Asia the Russians and the j.a.panese will spread and will carry their customs with their frontiers, and the South will remain to the British.

The world will belong to the Anglo-Saxons, Russians, and j.a.panese, and the German will remain alone with Austria and Hungary. His rule will be that of thought and of commerce, not that of the bureaucrat and the soldier. He made his appearance too late, and his last chance of making good the past, that of founding a Colonial Empire, was annihilated by the world-war.

For we shall not supplant the sons of Ichwe. Then will be realised the plan of the great Rhodes, who saw the salvation of humanity in the expansion of Britondom--in British Imperialism.

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento.

Hae tibi erunt artes: pacisque imponere morem, Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.