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In secret Germany has long been an apostate to the balance-of-power theory; the war has caused her to drop the mask, and it was without doubt her resolve never to submit to the chains of the balance in Europe, which forced three other States to waive their differences and form the Triple Entente. Simply stated this is cause and result.
The bitter struggle for markets, raw materials and colonies that followed the French-German War of 1870 developed into an armament race after 1899. From the Hague Peace Conference of 1899 to the outbreak of general war in 1914, desperate efforts were made to maintain the power-balance and avert a general war. The failure of these efforts proved the ineffectiveness of the balance-of-power formula.
Congress, on the one hand, desired to curtail the boundaries of Iowa for the purpose of creating a greater number of Northern States to balance the slave States of the South; whereas the people of Iowa protested against such curtailment not because of any balance-of-power considerations, but simply because they wanted a large State which would embrace the fertile regions of the Missouri on the West and of the St.
But a compromise appealed as it always does to the timid, balance-of-power party. Mr. Clay prevailed, and the manufacturers of New England, as well as elsewhere, finding that he had secured for them the benefit of time and of the chapter of accidents, rapidly came over to his support. The pressure was too much for Mr. Webster. Mr. Clay thought that if Mr.
In spite of Indian wars, of wars with France and England and Mexico, of depredations on our commerce by France and England and Barbary, of a currency that seemed to have been created for the promotion of bankruptcy and the organization of instability, of biennial changes in our tariffs and systems of revenue, of competition that ought to have been the death of trade, in spite of these and other evils, this country, in the brief term of one not over-long human life, increased in all respects at a rate to excite the gravest fears in the minds of men who had been nursed on the balance-of-power theory.
A century without general war, 1815 to 1914, led to a widespread balance-of-power assumption that planet-wide peace and prosperity could be established and maintained by preserving a balance between the armed forces of individual nations or alliances. Hence there need be no more general wars fought for survival or supremacy.
In the Middle Age the two ideas, nationality and independence, were inseparable, but with the completion of the State system of Europe, the rise of Prussia and the transformation of the half-oriental Muscovy into the Empire of the Czars, and with the growth in European politics of the Balance-of-Power theory, a disruption occurred between these ideas, and a series of protected nationalities arose.
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