Page:The guilt of William Hohenzollern.djvu/24

20 made himself independent of the Tsar and supported Austria and England.

From that date Russia turned away from Germany and established ever closer relations with France, so that Bismarck, in spite of his strong Russian sympathies, was ever more directed towards Austria. With Austria, in 1882, he associated Italy as an ally, when the French occupied Tunis, and thus deeply wounded the Italian imperialists who had been casting their eyes on that country.

England remained in “splendid isolation” outside of both combinations, but rather inclining to the Triple Alliance than towards the Russo-French Entente. Differences had arisen with France in connection with African aspirations (Morocco and more particularly Egypt, with the Sudan). In regard to Russia, her old hostility over the question of Turkey, and particularly of India, was continually finding fresh nourishment. On the other hand, England was always on friendly terms with Austria and Italy, and stood in no pronounced opposition to Germany, whose leader, Bismarck, had inflamed England's conflicts with Russia on the one hand, and with France on the other, in order to play between them the rôle of arbitrator and of the tertius gaudens. This was not, from the moral point of view, a very lofty policy, but it was a most fruitful one for the economic prosperity of Germany. It spared Germany all wars, at the very period of the uprise of imperialism, and enabled her to enlarge her industry, her commerce, and also her colonial possessions, by exploiting, without taking part in them, the imperialistic conflicts of the other Powers.

Thus we see that even in an epoch of imperialism it was possible for a Great Power to pursue another than