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amputation of their territory. Moreover, calculations of the most
classic type regarding the balance of forces made them inhospitable
to the idea of joining their powerful neighbor.
If
France had allied
herself to a neighboring nation and incomparably stronger land
power, she would have lost almost all of her independence, while as
an ally of a naval power or of a distant land power, she essentially
retained it. Such diplomatic mechanisms mark all eras.
Nor does the conflict between Russia and Austria-Hungary or
Germany seem essentially economic in origin. To be sure, their in–
terests may have been in conflict at one point or another. But Rus–
sia's interests--which, incidentally, were more political than eco–
nomic-clashed (in Persia and in Afghanistan) with those of Great
Britain more than with those of any other European nation. It was
the fate of the South Slavs that definitely separated Czarist Russia
from the other empires, despite their common conservatism, their
wish to preserve the dynastic principle, and their fear of revolu–
tionary movements.
The only way of giving some plausibility to the interpretation
espoused by Marxist sympathizers, is to represent the war of 1914-
1918 as determined above all by German-British rivalry, and then
to represent this rivalry as an effect of trade competition. Many
German publicists defended this thesis from other motives. Desiring
to clear their country of
all
guilt, to represent it as a victim of
jealous Haves, they made a great deal of articles published in the
English press at the end of the nineteenth century and more especial–
ly the beginning of the twentieth century-articles fulminating against
the expansion of Germany, which was described as a deadly threat
to Great Britain, and suggesting a resort to arms as the only means
of saving Old England's prosperity.
Actually such voices were isolated, and did not in any way re–
flect the opinion of leading banking, industrial, or political circles. It
was the opposite conception, as developed by Norman Angell in his
widely known book,
The Great Illusion,
that underlay the pre–
dominant opinion. What was Norman Angell's central thesis? It
was that modem war does not pay, that the annexation of provinces
does not increase the wealth of the inhabitants of the victorious
country. National wealth
is
increased by a certain amount
x,
but it
must
be
divided by a proportionately increased denominator; in the
