me in Brandenburg, drawing to itself all the military talent
and all the military adventurers, all those who regret emperors and hate
democracy, in the whole of Eastern and Central and South-Eastern Europe,
a power which would be geographically inaccessible to the military
forces of the Allies, might well found, at least in the anticipations of
the timid, a new Napoleonic domination, rising, as a phoenix, from the
ashes of cosmopolitan militarism. So Paris dare not love Brandenburg.
The argument points, then, to the sustentation of those moderate forces
of order, which, somewhat to the world's surprise, still manage to
maintain themselves on the rock of the German character. But the present
Government of Germany stands for German unity more perhaps than for
anything else; the signature of the Peace was, above all, the price
which some Germans thought it worth while to pay for the unity which was
all that was left them of 1870. Therefore Paris, with some hopes of
disintegration across the Rhine not yet extinguished, can resist no
opportunity of insult or indignity, no occasion of lowering the
prestige or weakening the influence of a Government, with the continued
stability of which all the conservative interests of Europe are
nevertheless bound up.

The same dilemma affects the future of Poland in the role which France
has cast for her. She is to be strong, Catholic, militarist, and
faithful, the consort, or at least the favorite, of victorious France,
prosperous and magnificent between the ashes of Russia and the ruin of
Germany. Roumania, if only she could he persuaded to keep up appearances
a little more, is a part of the same scatter-brained conception. Yet,
unless her great neighbors are prosperous and orderly, Poland is an
economic impossibility with no industry but Jew-baiting. And when Poland
finds that the seductive policy of France is pure rhodomontade and that
there is no money in it whatever, nor glory either, she will fall, as
promptly as possible, into the arms of somebody else.

The calculations of "diplomacy" lead us, therefore, nowhere. Crazy
dreams and childish intrigue in Russia and Poland and thereabouts are
the favorite indulgence at present of those Englishmen and Frenchmen who
seek excitement in its least innocent form, and believe, or at least
behave as if foreign policy was of the same _genre_ as a cheap
melodrama.

Let us turn, therefore, to something more solid. The German Government
has ann