A History of the Great War, 1914-

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I EUROPE IN THE LAST FOUR DECADES?GENERAL AND SPECIFIC CAUSES OF THE WAR The Two Central Empires most Representative of the Post-Feudal System?Superficial Political Progress?Real Political Backwardness?The Prussian Philosophy of Force? Three Great Motives of Aggression: Desire of Aggrandizement,...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I EUROPE IN THE LAST FOUR DECADES?GENERAL AND SPECIFIC CAUSES OF THE WAR The Two Central Empires most Representative of the Post-Feudal System?Superficial Political Progress?Real Political Backwardness?The Prussian Philosophy of Force? Three Great Motives of Aggression: Desire of Aggrandizement, Impatience of Restriction of Physical Prosperity, and Dread of Retribution for Past Spoliations?Germany's Consuming Longing to Become a World Power and to Possess the Primacy of Force on the Sea as well as on Land ?Envy of the Colonial Achievements of Other Nations and of their Commercial Development?The War-Passion? Readjustments and Evolution of International Relations? Two Principal European Groups finally Formed: the anti- Slavic and the anti-Teutonic?Failure of German Attempts to Bring France again to her Knees and of Austro-Hungarian Efforts to Gain Exclusive Control of the Balkan Peoples? Germany's Use of Austria-Hungary as a Tool to further her own Schemes of Expansion?The Several Crises Brought about by Kaiser Wilhelm's Policy?The Efficacy of the Triple Entente?How Great Britain Came to See that her Interests as Regards Continental Issues Coincide with those of France and Russia?The New Question of the Near-East that Grew out of the Turco-Italian and the Two Balkan Wars. UNLIKE many other of the great political convulsions in the world's history, the vast struggle of 1914 and 1915 in which Germany and Austria-Hungary, on the one side, and Russia, Great Britain, and France, on the other, were the principal participants, was not due to any accidental crisis or provocation. The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir-presumptive to the double throne of Austria- Hungary, and his consort, the Duchess of Hohen- berg, at Sarajevo, in the province of Bosnia..