Let us fix our attention on one or two salient points. Europe has often been accustomed to watch with anxiety the rise of some potent arbiter of her destinies who seems to arrogate to himself a large personal dominion. There was Philip II. There was Louis XIV. There was Napoleon a hundred years ago. Then, a mere shadow of his great ancestor, there was Napoleon III. Then, after the Franco-German war, there was Bismarck. Now it is Kaiser Wilhelm II. The emergence of some ambitious personality naturally makes Europe suspicious and watchful, and leads to the formation of leagues and confederations against him. The only thing, however, which seems to have any power of real resistance to the potential tyrant is not the manoeuvring of diplomats, but the steady growth of democracy in Europe, which, in virtue of its character and principles, steadily objects to the despotism of any given individual, and the arbitrary designs of a personal will. We had hoped that the spread of democracies in all European nations would progressively render dynastic wars an impossibility. The peoples would cry out, we hoped, against being butchered to make a holiday for any latter-day Caesar. But democracy is a slow growth, and exists in very varying degrees of strength in different parts of our continent. Evidently it has not yet discovered its own power. We have sadly to recognise that its range of influence and the new spirit which it seeks to introduce into the world are as yet impotent against the personal ascendancy of a monarch and the old conceptions of high politics. European democracy is still too vague, too dispersed, too unorganised, to prevent the breaking out of a bloody international conflict. THE PERSONAL FACTOR