With this summary, which has been expressed in Map I, you have a fair, though of course rough, division of Europe into its real national components.
Now let us ask what Germany and Austria would propose, in case of their victory, to make out of such materials.
[Illustration: MAP II. THE GERMANIC GROUP IN EUROPE
1. Luxembourg 2. Belgium 3. Germany 4. Switzerland 5. Italy 6. Mixed Italian and German 7. Russia 8. Bohemia 9. Bosnia 10. Austrian 11. Holland 12. Bukovina 13. Hungary 14. Serbia 15. Roumania 16. Bulgaria 17. Montenegro 18. Albania 19. Greece 20. Turkey
The boundaries of the “German feeling” group in Europe are very roughly suggested by the thick black line. Within that curiously twisted line nearly all speech and all feeling is German.]
In the first place Germany would keep all that she has, indifferent to national anomalies or the unquiet of subject and oppressed peoples. She would keep Alsace-Lorraine; she would keep in subjection the Poles who are already in subjection to her; she would leave the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy under the Hapsburgs with all its present possessions, whether those possessions grossly interfered with national realities or no. Would she annex territory, in spite of the first of the two postulates which I have already mentioned?
The German constitutional system is of its nature federal. There is room in it for many kinds of states, each possessed of a very great measure of independence, and if the inclusion within one commercial system and one military system also, however loose that inclusion, be called annexation, then we may say that Germany would annex in some degree. She would wish to control directly the Mouth of the Scheldt and probably the Teutonic-speaking part of Belgium, that is, the north of that country. She would certainly desire to administrate the Ardennes, which would be her frontier against France, and she would quite certainly take over Luxembourg.
As to Holland, her plan would probably be different there from that pursued in any other case. She would leave it as independent in its own eyes as it was before; she might insist upon an alliance with the Dutch army, she would certainly insist upon commercial terms, and probably rights of using certain ports in certain cases for war. But nothing but inexcusable folly would tempt her to go further. The position of Holland after a German settlement might not uncertainly be compared to the position of Hamburg in the old days, on a larger scale, a free State just as Hamburg was a free city.