A History of World War I - The Great War in Europe and the World, 1914-1918 [Quintessential Classics] (Illustrated)

For many generations before the Great War the delicate relations between the jealously sovereign states – aptly called the "balance of power" – had been manipulated by a professional class of "diplomatists" with the aid of military and naval attaches and of spies and secret service. The customs and methods of diplomacy had been determined in large part at a time when they conformed quite nicely to the purposes and ideals of the divine-right dynasts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when democracy was constantly preached and increasingly practiced, they might have seemed old-fashioned and anachronistic. To be sure, there were some modifications both in the objects and in the methods of diplomacy: as a result of the industrial changes in our own day, economic questions provided a larger and more attractive field for tortuous diplomatic negotiation than mere dynastic problems; and by the use of the telegraph, the telephone, and the cable the individual diplomatist was kept in closer touch than formerly with his home government. Still, however, the diplomatists were mainly persons of a class, elderly, suave, insinuating, moving mysteriously their wonders to perform. Democrats who in many countries had laid violent hands upon innumerable institutions of despotism and had brought most matters of public concern to the knowledge of a universal electorate, hesitated to assail this last relic of divine-right monarchy or to trust the guidance of international relations to an enfranchised democracy which might by the slightest slip upset the balance of power and plunge an anarchic world into an abyss...