To the liberal idealist the thought of a possible Swiss system or group of Swiss systems comes readily to mind.  One thinks of a grouping of groups of Republics, building up a United States of Eastern Europe.  But neither Hohenzollerns nor Tsar would welcome that.  The arm of democratic France is not long enough to reach to help forward such a development, and Great Britain is never sure whether she is a “Crowned Republic” or a Germanic monarchy.  Hitherto in the Balkans she has lent her influence chiefly to setting up those treacherous little German kings who have rewarded her so ill.  The national monarchs of Serbia and Montenegro have alone kept faith with civilisation.  I doubt, however, if Great Britain will go on with that dynastic policy.  She herself is upon the eve of profound changes of spirit and internal organisation.  But whenever one thinks of the possibilities of Republican development in Europe as an outcome of this war, it is to realise the disastrous indifference of America to the essentials of the European situation.  The United States of America could exert an enormous influence at the close of the war in the direction of a liberal settlement and of liberal institutions....  They will, I fear, do nothing of the sort.

It is here that the possibility of some internal change in Germany becomes of such supreme importance.  The Hohenzollern Imperialism towers like the black threat of a new Caesarism over all the world.  It may tower for some centuries; it may vanish to-morrow.  A German revolution may destroy it; a small group of lunacy commissioners may fold it up and put it away.  But should it go, it would at least take with it nearly every crown between Hamburg and Constantinople.  The German kings would vanish like a wisp of smoke.  Suppose a German revolution and a correlated step forward towards liberal institutions on the part of Russia, then the whole stage of Eastern Europe would clear as fever goes out of a man.  This age of international elbowing and jostling, of intrigue and diplomacy, of wars, massacres, deportations en masse, and the continual fluctuation of irrational boundaries would come to an end forthwith.

So sweeping a change is the extreme possibility.  The probability is of something less lucid and more prosaic; of a discussion of diplomatists; of patched arrangements.  But even under these circumstances the whole Eastern European situation is so fluid and little controlled by any plain necessity, that there will be enormous scope for any individual statesman of imagination and force of will.

There have recently been revelations, more or less trustworthy, of German schemes for a rearrangement of Eastern Europe.  They implied a German victory.  Bohemia, Poland, Galicia and Ruthenia were to make a Habsburg-ruled State from the Baltic to the Black Sea.  The Jugo-Slav and the Magyar were to be linked (uneasy bedfellows) into a second kingdom, also Habsburg ruled; Austria was to come into the German Empire as a third Habsburg dukedom or kingdom; Roumania, Bulgaria and Greece were to continue as independent Powers, German ruled.  Recently German proposals published in America have shown a disposition to admit the claims of Roumania to the Wallachian districts of Transylvania.