Page:Future of England - Peel.djvu/153

Rh the Polish provinces unless far more stringent measures were adopted, even than those of Bismarck. Thus in the very fatherland itself, Pan-Germanism has its difficulties with national sentiment.

Yet these difficulties are literally as nothing compared with the external obstacles to Pan-Germanism raised by democracy. Of the 30,000,000 Germans who choose to reside outside Germany, how many wish to place themselves under the sceptre of the Kaiser? Not 1,000,000, not 500,000 at most. The Pan-German agitation has been most active among the 11,000,000 of Austro-Hungarian Germans, but has yielded the poorest result. The Germans scattered through Hungary and through Bohemia are gradually throwing in their lot with the Magyars or the Czechs. In Austria itself, when Pan-Germanism raises its head, the whole force of the Catholic Church, whose policy is opposed to union with Protestants, is raised to quell it, and amid an entirely Catholic population of Germans that Church wields immense force. When Pan-Germans, in their disgust and in order to cover their retreat, raised the cry of "Los von Rom," the Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Este replied in the famous words: "Away from Rome is away from Austria." The observation was unanswerable.

Still less do the men of the Germanic stock in Switzerland, or Holland, or Belgium, or the United States, yearn for the Pan-German ideal. For no