Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/16

2 say, "are nearer the truth when we regard it as a Russo-German war. Was not, indeed, the original issue, 'in plain words, whether Serbia should become an Austrian vassal or remain a Russian too; '? Why should you fight, then, for Serbia and for Russian predominance in the Balkans?" And then the Germans would come and say to us, "Well, this is, in the first place, our quarrel with England, for 'a place in the sun.' Did not they invent that wretched encompassment policy in order to encircle us and to cut us off from every foreign market, thus blocking the way to the realisation of our world-policy? Why should you Russians, whose dynasty has always been friendly with ours, join them and play their game? Why should you, chiefly a Continental and Asiatic power, whose principal interest lies, according to us Germans, in the Far East, why should you fight for British predominance on the seas?"

Well, ladies and gentlemen, what is the best means to parry and to refute such arguments, based chiefly on the idea of the incongruity of interest between the allies? Is it not to show that the two views on the war which I have just set out are one, or rather, that they are two different sides of the same view? There is something in common between the German world-policy directed against Great Britain, and the Austrian Balkan pohcy directed against Russia; and that something is German aggression. I do not think that the first part of this assertion, i.e. that the German conflict