For the last twenty-five years the process of Germanizing has been going on without interruption. A bitter war of races and languages is being waged between the Austrian German and the Magyar, between the Teuton and the Slav. Of the Slav the Austrian Teuton wants to make his political slave. To him ‘Slav’ and ‘slave’ are synonymous words; and when we consider that the Slavs are disunited in language and religion, and that they hate each other almost as cordially as they hate the _Niemets_; and when we further consider that behind the ten millions of Austrian Germans there will be sixty-five millions of other Germans to support them, whilst the Catholic Tcheches and Poles can only fall back on the support of abhorred and heretical Russia, there is every reason to fear that the Slav must eventually come under the economic and political control of the Austrian Germans—that is to say, ultimately under the influence of the German Empire. But it is not only the Slavs of the Austrian Empire that are threatened by German absorption; that absorption has rapidly extended to the Slav States of the Balkan Peninsula. On the south as well as on the north of the Danube, Austria has been used as the ‘cat’s-paw,’ or, to use the more dignified expression of Emperor William, as the ‘loyal _Sekundant_’ of the Hohenzollern. The occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in defiance of the Treaty of Berlin, was the beginning of that Austrian _Drang nach Osten_ policy, the next object of which is the possession of the Gulf of Salonica, and the ultimate object of which is the control of Constantinople.” XVI.—GERMANY CONTROLLING TURKEY.[11] [11] This was published in 1906. “The absorption of Turkey is not a distant dream: it is very nearly an accomplished fact. Twenty-five years ago Germany declared she had no political stake in the affairs of Turkey. As recently as the ’seventies, Bismarck proclaimed in the Reichstag that the Eastern Question was not worth the loss of one Pomeranian soldier. To-day Germany is wellnigh supreme on the Bosphorus. She started by sending military instructors, amongst whom was the famous General Von der Goltz Pasha, and by reorganizing the Turkish Army on the German model. She then sent her travellers, absorbing the commerce of the country. She then sent her engineers, obtaining concessions, building railways, and practically obtaining the control of the so-called ‘Oriental’ line. Finally, she became the self-appointed doctor of the ‘sick man.’ Whenever the illness of recent years came to a crisis—after the Armenian and the Macedonian atrocities, after the Cretan insurrection—Germany stepped in and paralyzed the action of Europe. It was Germany that not only enabled Turkey to crush Greece and to restore her military prestige: it was Germany that enabled her to reap the fruits of victory.