count 1,526,563, so that a Silesian peasant has nearly eight times as much political power as a citizen of Berlin, Hamburg, or Dusseldorf. What this means to party strength may be judged by the fact that the 1,519,424 city voters elect ten Socialists and one member of the Centre; whereas the 1,526,563 country voters elect thirty-seven Conservatives, twenty-two Centre members, six Liberals, ten Radicals, three Alsatians, six Poles, one Dane, and no Social-Democrat. That explains why at the last Election the Conservatives, with 2,050,000 votes, captured 112 seats, the Centre, with 2,145,000 votes, 104 seats; the Liberals, with 1,716,000 votes 56 seats; the Radicals with 1,311,000 votes, 50 seats; and the Socialists, with 3,259,000 votes, only 43 seats. Taken together, the Conservative-Centre majority in the late Reichstag polled 4,940,000 votes, while the Liberal-RadicalSocialist minority polled 6,286,000 votes. The Socialist complaint over this anomaly falls everywhere on deaf ears; because, although the Conservatives profit most, the Centre also profits largely, and even the Liberals and Radicals have a great advantage over Socialists in the ratio of their voting strength to their Reichstag membership. Every year sees the Socialist disadvantage increased, so that the Socialist vote will probably require a very large increase to restore the parliamentary membership to the strength which it had in 1903. The Imperial Government, through the Prussian administration, is doing its best to prevent this calamity, and, as usual, pressure of an effective kind is being put upon the electorate; but the Prussian administration is so strongly Conservative in spirit that it needs here no ministerial instruction; it ignored in 1907 Prince Buelow's orders to preserve neutrality between Conservatives and Liberals. For acting as Government election-agent it has a quasi-legal sanction; for Bismarck, who told the Reichstag in 1881 that he opposed official electioneering as "derogatory to official dignity," issued some months later the decree of January 8th, 1882, in which an official's duty to defend and forward all Government measures is derived from the very oath of office.

The strength of the Government parties lies, however, less in Government support than in the admitted fact that there are many seats which they cannot possibly lose. That applies to typical Eastern Conservative constituencies with small electorates. As a religious party, a party therefore of unchanging composition, the Centre considers itself assured against very serious loss. These facts restrict the source from which the Social-Democrats are to draw the enormous increase of strength which they expect. If the Socialist gain is mainly at the cost of the other Opposition parties, the Government will have no cause to mourn ;

rather the contrary, because heavy Liberal and Radical losses to Socialism would be the one thing calculated to revive the attractions of Sammlungspolitik. Past German electoral history rather points to such a result. In the four elections of 1890, 1893, 1898, and 1903 (the 1907 election being ignored as fought with exceptional groupings), the Conservatives and Centre remained practically unchanged in strength. The same was true of the three Left parties taken together, which had a strength of 155, 145, 151, and 168. These figures show how constant is the antiConservative-Centre sentiment upon which the Left parties now rely for victory. But within the Left itself important changes took place. The strength of the National-Liberals remained constant, at 42, 53, 47, and 50; the positions of the Radicals and Socialists were almost exactly reversed. In 1890 the Radicals held 76 seats, and the Socialists 35. In 1903 the Radicals held only 36 seats, while the Socialists held 81. So that the one considerable change in the Reichstag in four elections was a great Socialist increase and a great Radical decline. The possibility that the position of 1903 may be restored is to-day the main reason for doubting the confidence of the Left parties. Such a result would naturally prove very disappointing to all German Progressives; but it would yield a stable Government majority, whereas a Left victory would probably produce an impossible situation, remediable only by repeated dissolutions until a tired electorate returns a Government majority in which the Social-Democrats will take no part. Unless, indeed, Dr. von Bethmann-Hollweg succeeded in buying over the NationalLiberals by means of taxation concessions. That is why the present Election, judged by what it will do, is hardly as momentous as partisans believe. But in its undoing potentialities; in the fact that it may deprive the Conservatives and Centre of a mastery which, with brief interruption, they have now exercised for thirty years, it is certainly the most important contest since the foundation of the Empire.

ROBERT CROZIER LONG.

ENGLAND, GERMANY, AND COMMON SENSE.

"FOR months past we have been living, and we are living now, in an atmosphere of passion such as we have perhaps never before experienced in Germany. At the root of this feeling is the determination of Germany to make its strength and capability prevail in the world." It was in these words that the Imperial Chancellor on November 10th, and again with added emphasis on December 5th, diagnosed the present temper of the German people; and it is because we are believed to have set ourselves against this determination, and to have threatened war rather than see "Germany's strength and capability prevail in the world," that the German people are banded in a universal league of animosity and resentment against us. The impression made by our recent diplomacy has left us, it is hardly too much to say, without a single friend in the Empire. Profoundly as the masses of Englishmen were shocked to discover that without knowing it they had been all but on the verge of war with Germany, Germans were still more shocked by the revelation that in a matter of secondary concern, one that touched none of our vital interests, we were ready, we even seemed to them anxious, to force a conflict. They feel as Russia felt when the Kaiser three years ago stepped to the side of his Austrian ally "in shining armour." Nothing will ever persuade them that but for our intervention they could not have made better terms with France. They regard themselves as worsted and humiliated in a diplomatic encounter in which we, and we alone, tipped the scales against them. They observe that British interests in Morocco remained to all appearances unaffected and British susceptibilities unroused by the French occupation of Fez and by the operations of Spain in the northern regions, and that it was only when a German gunboat was dispatched to Agadir that the British Government began to talk of a "new situation." They note that while a Franco-Spanish partition of Morocco was condoned by Downing Street the possibility of Germany sharing in the spoils was looked upon as a menace to be resisted by war. They point out that the rupture of the Act of Algeciras was acquiesced in by Great Britain until it seemed likely to work out to Germany's advantage, and that the principle of compensation encountered no opposition until the Wilhelmstrasse put in its claim for consideration. They find, in short, that throughout the Morocco crisis of 1911 we played our customary rôle,

throwing open the path of expansion to other nations but blocking it to Germany, and going out of our way to impede her legitimate development. Smooth protestations that "we do not desire to stand in the light of any Power which wants to find its place in the sun" count for little in the face of the facts that all our diplomatic compacts and agreements of the past ten years have one feature in common-Germany is excluded from them; that in 1904 we attempted to settle the fate of Morocco without consulting Germany, and as though Germany had no interest whatever in the Shereefian Empire; that in 1907 we disposed of Persia in similar fashion; that every sign of the lukewarmness of Italy in supporting her allies of the Triplice is hailed by the British Press with unconcealed gratification; and that wherever Germany turns she finds Great Britain comfortably established across her path. Against this accumulating evidence of ill-will catalogues of the agreements we concluded with Germany in other and happier days avail nothing. Indeed, if one were to survey from a German standpoint the past seventy or eighty years of Anglo-German relations, the legend of British friendliness would be, if not dissipated, at least severely discounted. Great Britain was Danish throughout the Schleswig-Holstein crisis, was decidedly pro-Austrian during the struggle of 1866, and from the Franco-Prussian war emerged with nothing but the cordial animosity of both sides. She never showed herself sympathetic to the movement for German unity. She never welcomed or aided the disappearance of a weakly, divided Germany and the rise of a powerful Empire in its place. She treated the latter alternately as an interesting prodigy to be lectured and patronised and as a commercial and political rival to be feared and thwarted; and while a philo-German tradition undoubtedly obtained in Downing Street up to the moment of the Kaiser's telegram to President Krüger, it never had its roots in any real instinct of friendliness and appreciation but was mainly the by-product of Anglo-French and Anglo-Russian antagonisms. The chief difference, according to the Germans, between Anglo-German relations as they were from, say, 1848 to 1895, and as they have been during the past sixteen years, is that in the latter epoch tendencies have hardened into prepossessions and a latent ill-will has developed into an open and deliberate policy of hostility. And that policy has never been made so manifest or pursued with so little disguise as in the recent negotiations over Morocco. Rightly or wrongly, all Germans believe that as the result of the British attitude and preparations their Government was forced to content itself with very much less than it had reasonably hoped to gain. The con

sequence is a feeling of bitter and universal anger that could hardly be intensified if the two nations were actually at war.

I am not, of course, subscribing to the German point of view, but merely trying to elucidate it. Many counterbalancing considerations would have to be weighed before it could be accepted either as a fair statement of Anglo-German relations in general or of the Morocco episode in particular. If Great Britain in the old days showed a certain backwardness in giving the Germans their due, in treating them as a matured and responsible Power, and in acknowledging that they had grown out of British tutelage, the Germans on their side displayed an almost morbid anxiety to have their new-won strength and importance recognised, and when no recognition was voluntarily forthcoming would often attempt to force it by a rather puerile and clamorous assertiveness. If the British seemed to the Germans needlessly “superior" and condescending, the Germans seemed to the British quite gratuitously "touchy." If our diplomacy of late years in its dealings with the Wilhelmstrasse has worn the aspect of a somewhat mechanical and unimaginative obstructiveness, their diplomacy has equally disconcerted Downing Street by its unnecessary brusqueness. There have, in fact, been faults of manner innumerable on both sides. The defects in the national character of both peoples contributed their inevitable share to the growing acrimony, and the estrangement necessarily deepened, on the German side at least, when the colonial fever began to influence German foreign policy and it was found that so far as all hope of a Greater Germany that would spread the German idea and receive German colonists and extend German trade was concerned, the Empire had been born too late. This was, and is, a natural, unreasoning, and keenly-felt grievance; and as the stress of rivalry in other spheres grew fiercer, as the Germans, duplicating British experience, began to change from a mainly agricultural to a mainly industrial basis, and as they woke, or were prodded awake, to the necessity of a strong navy and a large mercantile marine, the discovery was made that here, too, Great Britain had been before them. Modern, united, and aspiring Germany finds itself in a state of moral rebellion against the results of its lamentable history. Except on the hypothesis of trickery and strife-provoking duplicity, it cannot explain or reconcile itself to the monstrous unfairness of the fact that in the race for trade and Empire Great Britain should have acquired so great a start while Germany was still struggling through blood to attain the indispensable condition of unity. In the last number of this Review Mr. Sidney Low aptly enough compared the temper of the German people to that of a fox-terrier which has