Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/178

168 come about otherwise than by the foreign offices, and the excitable newspapers and populations behind them, showing a regrettable preference for the manière forte? In the Moroccan crisis of 1911, for instance, the author distributes his blame almost equally between France and Germany: France was too precipitate to realize on her investment, Germany was incredibly rude (p. 50). In the same way Austria is taken to task for showing a lack of consideration for Turkey in 1908, and Italy was, if anything, even more offensive in her manner of seizing Tripoli three years later.

Such then was the wisdom of the intelligent diplomat-historian before 1914. Stirred by the war to the very depth of our nature, we are fairly appalled by the shallowness of the analysis and the quackery of the remedies. But even more appalling is this thought: if the gentlemen who will gather together to draw up the great Peace are diplomats or diplomatic historians of the old school, satisfied with things as they are (except for the lamentable inclination of governments to use the loud pedal), without the vision of a world-union on the basis of a new moral and spiritual orientation, what becomes of the New Europe of which our dreamers dream?

interest attracted to this book of a Swiss professor, at the time of its publication, was probably due in large measure to the fact that it set out to demonstrate the weakness of Germany's economic system. It appeared at a time when perplexity over the financial staying power of the German Empire, under the stress of war, was at its height. Even as late as 1915, the banking community of the world at large had been talking of the war being terminated by "economic exhaustion"; and Germany, with her foreign trade suddenly cut off, with practically no means of raising funds abroad for her war expenses, and with her three allies virtually bankrupt or in a precarious financial situation, had seemed to be indicated as the power likely first to succumb.

Yet not the least indication of such exhaustion had appeared. Each successive war loan, issued at intervals of six months, elicited larger subscriptions than its predecessor. One war loan of 1915 surpassed all previous achievements of any government, and has even to-day been overtopped, in the amount of subscriptions, only by the British war loan of last February and by Germany's own loan of the ensuing April. Professor Millioud's thesis, that the remarkable economic development of Germany, in the twenty or thirty years before the war, was itself built up by essentially unsound methods, and that an overwhelming