But in the spring and summer of 1918 a great change came over Allied policy with respect to the Austrian question. It would be difficult to say how far this change was due to a growing realization on the part of the Allies of the essential justice of the claims of the Austrian subject races; or to the failure of all hopes of inducing Austria to make a separate peace; or to the very clever diplomacy of the Czecho-Slovaks and the obligations under which the latter had placed the Allies by their services in Siberia and Russia. I am inclined to think, however, that the change was caused in very large part by the gradually maturing conviction that, to use Mr. Henderson’s phrase, ‘Germany, if she had not yet conquered her enemies, had at least conquered her allies’;[53] that Austria’s independence, gravely and progressively impaired ever since the formation of her alliance with Berlin in 1879, had now become definitely a thing of the past, so that if she continued to exist at all, it would be only as a satellite and tool of Germany, a German bridge towards the Near East, the gangway of Mitteleuropa. Certain declarations made from the highest quarters in Austria in July, 1918, after a meeting of the two Kaisers--declarations announcing the intention ‘to tighten the bonds between the two empires in the sense of a durable fellowship in time of peace,’ confirmed the fear of the formation of a Central European _bloc_ with a population of 120,000,000 and an active army of 12,000,000 men. If this scheme were realized, Germany would have doubled her power and won the War, even though she restored all the territory she had occupied. From all this the conclusion seemed plain that the only way for the Allies to defeat the Pan-Germanist plan and place a permanent check upon Prussian militarism was to disrupt Austria-Hungary and to form a series of national states along the eastern frontier of Germany. It was now the destruction of Austria that was a European necessity. Hence, in the summer of 1918, the Allied governments, one after the other, formally approved the claims of the two chief malcontent Hapsburg races, the Czecho-Slovaks and the Yugo-Slavs, to unity and independence, and the Czecho-Slovaks were even recognized as an allied and belligerent nation. These declarations, accompanied or soon followed as they were by the sudden change in the military situation, the rapid and unbroken series of Allied victories on every front, and the collapse of Bulgaria, sealed the fate of Austria-Hungary.