Each phase of this blood-stained period discloses the same carnival of mendacity and intrigue, the subordination of the public interest to the designs of a few ambitious men, the exploitation of patriotism, self-sacrifice, patience and valour by officials, whose inhuman outlook and mediocrity of mind were screened by a mask of mystery. A piecemeal study would be profitless. Military instruction might be gained from oft-recurring slaughter, and hints on how to hoodwink peoples could certainly be gathered from spasmodic intervals of peace. But these are not the lessons the world seeks, they are precisely what it wishes to forget. Rather, the effort must be made to trace the underlying impulse in this tragic drama, which runs through it like a “leit-motif,” which welds together processes so varying in their nature, and renders them cumulative and inseparable, until they culminate in one unified and comprehensive act. In its broadest sense, that impulse had its source in a frame of mind, in a false conception, expressed in outworn governmental systems left uncontrolled and tolerated by the victims, who, though suffering, dreaded change. This frame of mind was general throughout Europe; it was not confined to the Central Empires, whose ruling classes, by their superior efficiency, merely offered the supreme example of autocratic Governments which aimed at world-dominion both in a political and economic sense. To the junkers and business men in Germany and Austria-Hungary, the war of liberation in the Balkans in 1912 was an opportunity to be seized, with a lack of scruple as cynical as it was frank, because they hoped to fish in troubled waters; its perversion into an internecine struggle was considered clever diplomacy. The Treaty of Bucharest in 1913 was regarded as a triumph of statecraft, since it caused a readjustment of the “Balance of Power” in favour of themselves. But the so-called democratic Western Powers gave their tacit acquiescence to these nefarious proceedings; their association with the Russian Empire, so far from being designed to correct immorality and injustice, perpetuated all the evils of a system based on interested motives and selfish fears. The family of nations consisted of six Great Powers; Small States existed under sufferance and were treated as poor relations. Their rights were nebulous and sometimes inconvenient, not to be recognized until they could be extorted. This happened sometimes. The “Balance of Power” was a net with closely woven meshes. Even the strongest carnivori in the European jungle required, at times, the assistance of a mouse.