(_c_) Because, even if you watch the supplies of contraband to neutrals, and propose to stop supplies obviously destined for German use, you cannot prevent Germany from buying the same material "made up" by the neutral: for example, an Italian firm can import copper ore quite straightforwardly, smelt it, and offer the metal in the open market. There is nothing to prevent a German merchant entering that market and purchasing, unless Italy forbids all export of copper, which it is perfectly free not to do. To leave this side question of blockade, and to return to the relative advantages and disadvantages of our enemy's central position, we may repeat as a summary of its disadvantages the single truth that it compels our enemy to fight upon two fronts. All the rest is advantage. It is an advantage that Germany and Austria-Hungary, as a corollary to their common central position, are in some part of similar race and altogether of a common historical experience. For more than a hundred years every part of the area dominated by the Germanic body--with the exception of Bosnia and Alsace-Lorraine--has had a fairly intimate acquaintance with the other part. The Magyars of Hungary, the Poles of Galicia, of Posen, of Thorn, the Croats of the Adriatic border, the Czechs of Bohemia, have nothing in race or language in common with German-speaking Vienna or German-speaking Berlin. But they have the experience of generations uniting them with Vienna and with Berlin. In administration, and to some extent in social life, a common atmosphere spreads over this area, nearly all of which, as I have said, has had something in common for a hundred years, and much of which has had something in common for a thousand. In a word, as compared with the Allies, the Germanic central body in Europe has a certain advantage of moral homogeneity, especially as the governing body throughout is German-speaking and German in feeling. That is the first point of advantage--a moral one. The second is more material. The Governments of the two countries, their means of communication and of supply, are all in touch one with another. Those governments are working in one field within a ring fence, and working for a common object. They are not only spiritually in touch; they are physically in touch. An administrator in Berlin can take the night express after dinner and breakfast with his collaborator in Vienna the next morning.