Our diplomatic methods during those days may have been brusque and annoying, but our aim was peace. Though we are held up continually as the disturber of European peace, driven on by a mad desire for territorial aggrandizement, we are the only big European nation which has not increased her territory during the last twenty-five years.
Russia tried to steal the Far East and is now going half shares with England in Persia. England annexed the Boer republics and is playing with Russia for the Persian States.
France has taken Morocco; Italy, Tripoli; Austria-Hungary has formally annexed Bosnia.
Even little Servia, who is praised just now as the most just and God-fearing nation, has succeeded in wresting a large part of Macedonia, inhabited by Bulgarians, from her Bulgarian allies.
The only conquest we went in for was an exchange of a strip of West Africa, which we got from France as a kind of hush money, for her Morocco policy, England, Italy, and Spain having taken their payment in advance.
We have led no war of aggression for new territories, and we are held up to moral contempt by all those nations who have taken their shares.
We went to war because we had to keep faith with Austria. We do not and we did not approve of every step our ally has taken. But our idea of a faithful alliance is not that you can chuck your partner whenever he has made a mistake, but that you must stick to him through good and evil.
You may upbraid him privately if you dislike his methods; you may give him a fair warning, but as long as your bargain exists you must stick to it.
And our alliance with Austria is not a mere piece of political strategy, not an unholy alliance like that of republican France with despotic Russia or Anglo-Saxon England with Mongol Japan.
Our States have a common history. We are, as far as the Austrian Germans are concerned--about a third of the population of Austria--the same people. We have, and that is perhaps the most decisive point in the alliance, nearly the same position on the surface of the globe.
We are both inland empires situated in the centre of Europe, surrounded by many different nations, all of whom may bear some grudge against us.
As long as our joint frontiers are safe we can stand back to back and face calmly any unnatural confederation like the present one.