to modern Parliamentarism and Democracy. The Emperor William went so far as to declare himself expressly an instrument of God, and his official style “By the Grace of God” took on an anti-democratic sense and meaning. The Monarchy by Divine Right and Divine Grace stood over against the democratic principle “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
This absolutism was a continuation of the medieval conception of Empire. The Imperium bequeathed by Rome to the Germans was administered by the bigoted Hapsburgs who, amid the religious and political excitement of the Reformation, carried through a violent Counter-Reformation. Prussia became Protestant and strove with Austria for overlordship in Germany until Austria was finally expelled. Then Germany took over the Roman Imperium, the Imperial dignity, on her own account. It is one of the many perversities of history—though when we talk of “history we really say “human beings”—that the Roman Catholic supra-national—and therefore really “Catholic”—Imperialism of the Holy Roman Empire was carried forward by a Protestant and national German State, and that the Roman Catholic State which had stood at the head of the Catholic Imperium renounced its Holy Roman Imperial dignity, proclaimed itself a secularized Austrian Empire and ended by accepting a subordinate position as the advance-guard of Germany in the East. Hence the senselessness of Austrian and Prussian policy in the modern era.
Under Prussia, Germany turned the Catholic idea of the Holy Roman Imperium into a pagan Roman and German national ideal. By means of pan-German philosophy it developed its forcible “Urge Towards the East” into a general programme, that is to say, into an aspiration to rule over the Old World of Europe, Asia and Africa. To this end its colonial policy and its alliance with the declining Ottoman Empire were alike directed.
After a first attempt to form a “League of the Three Emperors” the Triple Alliance was founded under the economic and political pressure of Prussia. In it, Italy had no organic position, for the Triple Alliance really signified German domination over Austria-Hungary. It is characteristic that the beginnings of the Triple Alliance are to be found in Bismarck’s negotiations with the Magyars or, rather, with Andrássy, as I have pointed out in speaking of Magyar propaganda in America; and, as Austrian Catholic politicians have insisted, the Magyar State was in the hands of Calvinists—of whom Tisza was an outstanding example—and of Freemasons. For this reason the
