In pursuing her ambition, Germany has found invaluable instruments in the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires. These States would be anachronisms in a free democratic Europe, and were destined, if all went well with the world’s development, to be transformed into willing federations or else to dissolve into their constituent peoples. But neither federalisation nor dissolution suited the interest of the tyrannous minority which has so far dominated and exploited each of these Empires for its own selfish purposes. In the Hapsburg Empire the tyrants are the corrupt Magyar aristocracy, which dominates Hungary, and through Hungary the Empire as a whole. In the Ottoman Empire they are the Young Turks, a secret society with its central committee at Constantinople and branch committees in the provinces, and with a gang of sordid adventurers as their puppets in the nominal headship of what professes to be a democratic government. The Young Turks and the Magyar Oligarchy saw that the guarantee of Prussia, and that alone, could preserve their tyranny against the progress of Democracy in Europe. The Prussians saw that the Turks and Magyars could sell them 70,000,000 human beings for “canonen futter,” in addition to the 70,000,000 Germans, Poles, Alsatians and Danes whom they already possessed. This extra 70,000,000 seemed to put world dominion within their reach. The bargain was struck, and the War was made under which the whole world is suffering, and must still suffer for a season, if liberty is to be saved and the evil of centuries to be brought to a tardy end. There is no possibility of returning to the _Status Quo_ before August 1914—first, because the _Status Quo_ under the Turks was itself the mere perpetuation of an oppression and a misery that disgraced the civilised world, and that should have been ended long before; and secondly, because it has been made unspeakably worse during the War than it was before it. Every element of good that had maintained its existence under Turkish government, and that made less intolerable a system that in itself was too wicked to survive, is being stamped out now by deportation, spoliation, abduction and massacre. The evil has purged itself altogether of the good. Turkish tyranny has been stimulated by the German alliance into an unnatural vitality, and the Central Confederates dream of putting the clock in South-Eastern Europe a century back. Debauching one of the Balkan States by gorging her with spoil from the rest, they hope to stamp out liberty in the Balkans altogether, to reconquer for Militarism the field which the 19th century won here for Democracy, and to build over it a bridge by which three tyrant peoples, the Prussian, the Magyar and the Turk, shall join hands in dominating and destroying without interference a multitude of smaller and weaker peoples from Alsace to Rumania and from Schleswig to Baghdad.