The World On Fire

hate which the impolitic annexation of Alsace-Lorraine had thrust upon his shoulders, he could do no less with- out offering the breast of Germany to the ravisher. A lamb to the slaughter, indeed, with La Revanche in every mouth! What would he do, with men yet alive who remembered Jena, and the ceaseless raids and rav- ages of Bonaparte? But in a hundred crises he kept his head; he kept the peace. He had plenty of chances to smash France forever; he did not take them. An ambitious prince might have put a relative on the throne of Louis XIV while France was torn by the Boulanger affair, the Pa- nama scandal, the Dreyfus horror, when Diogenes might have gone through France with a modern search-light for his lantern without finding a single man who was not a traitor to his country, or at least to the Republic, and the most trustworthy man of affairs was he who could be trusted to put the "double-cross" on every one. The Kaiser never stirred. It would have been easy to destroy the Russian menace at the time when Japan was straining the sin- ews of the Tartar giant, or when the Moscow Revolution showed that the Tsar could not trust his own soldiers, and the Imperial Guard, hastily summoned from St. Pe- tersburg, shut up the garrison of Moscow in the Kremlin, trained their own guns upon them, and disarmed them. The Kaiser did nothing. Surely the Russo-Japanese war and the Boer war showed plainly — if any fool there were who could not see it à priori — that the greatest, widest, best, and only impregnable military base is the sea. Today we can bring Russian troops from Vladivostock or Archangel and land them at Ostend, a million at a time, and Germany must be well-served indeed by spies if she knows of the operation in time to guard against it. Is it then so treacherous and aggressive if Germany, threatened by an alliance (hypocritically described as an entente) of