true to-day. If the Prussians should succeed in maintaining the existence of Austria-Hungary, and, by thus strangling Bohemia, could realise their great plan of a line from Hamburg to the Persian Gulf, they would become masters of Central Europe, masters of the Mediterranean; they would have the whole of Turkey under their control, and could menace Egypt. The great Oriental Railway runs from Constantinople to Baghdad and Cairo. Suez and Egypt, as well as India, and the security of the English route to India, would be compromised. It is mainly England and the vital roadway to her world-empire that the Pan-German design menaces.
France equally would be crushed, deprived of her richest provinces, pushed aside, and her national existence threatened.
As regards Italy, her fate would be no happier: Germany would exercise her hegemony in the Adriatic, as she wishes to possess the whole Eastern Adriatic shore and even Greece; the irredentist territory could never be restored to Italy; the great future which is awaiting Italy in the New Europe would never be realised. Serbia could never think of a union with the rest of her race; and, above all, all the oppressed nationalities of Central Europe in Austria-Hungary and in the Balkans, would continue to suffer under the yoke of Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest.
