Power acquires an aggrandisement that may menace the liberties of the rest of the world. To preserve the balance of power, as against the undue preponderance of Austria, was the real object of the terrible and desolating War of the Thirty Years. In more recent years the kingdom of Belgium itself was founded upon the principle of maintaining the balance of power in Europe, and in furtherance of the international arrangement then effected, it was thought necessary by the British Government, during the Franco-Prussian War, to enter into a treaty with each belligerent by which Britain undertook, in the event of either of the two Powers attacking Belgium, to become the ally of the other Power for the purpose of defending that country. The Crimean War itself was waged by Britain, France, and Turkey against Russia for the avowed purpose of preserving the balance of power, and to prevent on that account the absorption of European Turkey into the territories of Russia. During the last fifty years the only disturbers of the balance of power in Europe have been Austria and Prussia. These two nations rudely and wantonly disturbed it by their aggressions upon Denmark in 1864; subsequently Prussia alone in 1866 threatened the balance in her operations against her weaker neighbour. In the case of Poland, the three Great Powers, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, instead of preventing each other's aggrandisement, conspired to share among them the spoliation of their weaker neighbour. Now, after all these years, Austria and Prussia—-for, after all, the German Empire, from the international point of view, is but Prussia writ large—have conspired once more, for purposes of their own aggrandisement, and with a view to seizing the territories of their weaker neighbours and then dividing the spoils, to disturb beyond the replacement of its equilibrium the balance of power in Europe.
The foregoing opposing principles we have described as fundamental and absolute, one set belonging necessarily to one side, the other set to the other side. There is, however, another important policy which is common to both sides, and it is the operation of this policy which has complicated the history of Europe during the last quarter of a century. It is the principle, forced upon international politics by the necessity of things, that each nation is entitled to maintain and further its economic interests. Each nation is entitled to do the best it can for itself in regard to finding outlets for its population, trade, and commerce. This right has undoubtedly obscured, especially amongst those peoples, such as the Germans, whose economic progress has developed with more acceleration than that of other nations, the
