SOME WAR REVELATIONS AN ADDRESS BY CHANCELLOR A. L. MCCRIMMON, Before the Empire Club of Canada, Toronto, MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN,-The war reveals certain great principles of action and certain great trends of history. Some of our preconceptions have been verified; others have not been verified; our minds have been disabused of them. The New York Times in an editorial said, We did not know Germany a few months ago, but we know her right well now." We may not know her to the full, but at least there are a few revelations of which we are fairly certain. The war reveals to us the trend of German ambition. When I think of the history and traditions of Prussia and Germany, three persons come to my mindFrederick of Prussia, Bismarck, and the present Kaiser. Nearly all of the great nationalistic movements of Germany have their origin in, or flow through, these three men. Frederick had an economic policy; he was a mercantilist, and he looked across the water and saw that Great Britain had become great, which he attributed largely to her woolindustry; so, from a national view-point, he began to build up a silk-industry. A national policy of industry is a good thing for a country as long as it is not allowed to minister to an ultra-egoistic and selfish policy which is antagonistic to the best interests of mankind. Bismarck also had a national policy, and identifying himself, rightly or wrongly, with the system of protection, he developed the industries. There resulted an urbanisation of the population of Germany, and an over-production in certain lines of manufacturing industry relative to the home market. That caused the eyes of Germany to turn to foreign markets, to a foreign trade, to a merchant marine, and to the protection of that marine. The present Kaiser's policy respecting industry and commerce is well known. There was a populational problem for Frederick the Great; he had to bind together the people of Prussia with a common ideal and certain common objects. The same problem faced Bismarck in larger proportions, to have a confederation of the German states, and building on the foundations of Napoleon, he turned the attention of Germany to certain common objects. You remember he went north to Denmark and seized Schleswig-Holstein. He rapped in 1866 at the doors of Vienna; he brought in the southern German principalities in 1870, having made France appear as the aggressor in the Franco-Prussian War. Now we find the Kaiser with his populational problem of what to do with his sixty-five or seventy million people on an area no larger than that occupied by France's forty million, and the population increasing a million every year. He does not want to lose them by emigration, so colonisation and foreign policies appeal to him. The military policy of Frederick was to command a large and efficient army, and he was successful in that. You remember the line runs true again with Bismarck and Moltke; they wanted and were successful in getting together a military machine probably as perfect mechanically as the world has ever seen. The present Kaiser goes Bismarck one better; he says, "Not only on land but on the sea, not only a policy respecting the army, but a policy respecting the navy;" and looking out upon the water he says, "Our future is there, the trident must be in our hands; we must send the power of German autocracy wherever the German flag flies." Necessarily there followed the same evolution in political theory and political practice. Frederick of Prussia had in mind the making of Prussia the dominant power among the Germanic states. Bismarck widened that out and he said, "We must give to this German Confederation, this German Empire, the hegemony of Europe; it must sit astride Europe dictating the policies to the states;" and to a certain extent success has crowned the efforts of the German Empire. The Kaiser, enthused with that policy, and with the problems I have mentioned, began to think about world-empire and to talk in world terms; and so we have the widening horizon and we have the ambition and the trend of German life. The trouble with Germany was she came late into the world of nations. She found that there was no elbow-room there, and so, if she was going to have a colonisation policy, if she was going to develop that kind of foreign policy to which I have referred, she would have, by main force or by political expedient or illegitimate means, to take possession of sundry portions of the earth. Well, she got a foothold, you recall, in China, in the Pacific Islands and in Samoa in 1900. Before this certain men of commerce had urged Bismarck to have a colonising policy in southern Africa, but Bismarck turned a cold shoulder to that until the middle of the eighties, and afterward was only half-hearted in any colonising policy. The usual programme, of course, was to have some financiers buy up a portion of territory from a native chieftain and then an appeal was made to the German Empire for protection and political power. As late as 1905 and 1911 you remember the present Kaiser endeavoured to get a naval base and a coaling seaport on the west coast of Morocco. He was opposed by every European power except Austria; he was opposed by the United States, who began to understand something of the reason for placing a coaling station there when there were 8,000,000 Germans in southern Brazil. So he found his policy limited in South America and the Far East, and the attention of Germany came closer home. I have no time to speak of Alsace, but there is a festering sore on the boundary line between Germany and France, just because Germany wanted to get more than the dictates of common decency would really allow. But the Balkan peninsula and the Asia Minor peninsula were before the German Empire and the German diplomats. Here is a kingdom falling to pieces, and the boast was made that it would not be very long until the British mails were going down through Vienna and Constantinople and Bagdad to the Persian Gulf. The Kaiser went down and made a personal visit to Constantinople; he obtained options on the Bagdad Railway; he got certain branch lines, and his Germanic bowels of compassion overflowing at the thought of the |