THE NEW EUROPE
and members. The Kölnische Volkszeitung even spoke of the Catholic mire in Austria. And they were right. Catholicism in Austria, having crushed the Reformation, especially in Bohemia, is spiritually inert and stagnant, relying completely on the police state of Vienna, and very different from the Catholicism of England, the United States or Germany, which has to face an ecclesiastical, cultural, and political enemy. To some extent Slav Catholicism is also saner, since it has to stand guard against strong Hussite memories and a pronounced anti-clerical (not anti-religious) movement. In Austria clericalism means the misuse of religion for political ends.
In Russia, too, religion plays a decisive part in the war. The great bulk of the nation is devoted to the Church, and regards the struggle with Turkey from the religious point of view, as a conflict of Christianity and Islam. The Russian claim to Constantinople has its religious and mystical side. But just as even Turkey could not rouse the old passion of a Holy War and disappointed German hopes of Panislamism, so, in Russia, the national and political motives overshadow more and more the religious. There are influential circles in Russia which approach the Polish and all other Slav problems from an ecclesiastical angle, and politicians who, like the old "Slavophils" and Dostoievsky, still dream of Russian Messianism. But even these politicians no longer preach a policy of aggression against the West. There is no Russian or Slavonic pendant to Pangermanism, no aggressive Panslavism, no "Slav Danger."
The Pangermans proclaim themselves as the direct successors of the 'Holy Roman Empire of German nation.' They praise the medieval Church for her support of Germany in her 'Drang nach Osten' and in her Germanisation of the Slavs, and they recognise the mediaval Empire as the forerunner of "Mitteleuropa." The French Catholic thesis that German Protestantism, as personified in Luther, Kant and Nietzsche, is the real aggressor, requires modification in the light of the aggressive policy of Catholic Austria. Meanwhile, it is highly amusing to find German Catholic writers accusing the Freemasons of having caused the war. They forget that the Kings of Prussia, and other German princes also, have always favoured Freemasonry, and that it has the fervent support of the Magyars, Prussia's most faithful ally.
The Allies have proclaimed as their aim the reconstruction
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