Land & Water 
May 1 6, 191 8 
at the same time, it informs us (if it is true) that thi rate of 
loss \ras exceedingly high. Tlie average tiiiie for return, 
taking all cases together, is about four months. But tlie 
returns in the first month are a very small proportion of th ; 
whole. You cannot give an exact figure because the nature 
of the fighting and the pressure for men to be returned as 
soon as possible are two factors that between them make it 
vary for different actions. In the winter, for instance, if 
you are dealing with the co.mparative quiet, the proportion 
to total "off strength" of slightly sick who are in hospital 
for less than a month is much liigher than the same propor- 
tion in fine weather and in very violent action ; for the type 
of case received into hospital is very different in one case 
from what it is in the other. But, at any rate, 20,000 return- 
ing in the first three weeks does not mean less than — and 
probably m^ans much more than — ^200,000 hospital cases of 
all kinds within tlie same period. It means a total casualty 
list of certainly nearer 300,000 than 250,000. This, of course, 
is working on a bare minimum, and the second half of the six 
weeks, with their tremendous local actions (ro divisions 
between Avre and Somme, 6 against Bethune, to in the 
fighting for Kemmel, 4 in the check inflicted by the Belgians, 
II or 15 in the last check of April 2gth), surely keeps up the 
average. 
The Rumanian Peace 
THE peace whicli the Central Empires, under the 
direction of Prussia, have imposed upon Rumania 
is very instructive ; yet that not altogether, 
I think, in the fashion represented by most of 
our publicists. 
These, as a rule, emphasise the harshness of the terms, 
and hold them out as an example to others of what a German 
victory means. But there is much more in the incident 
than that. As for mere harshness, there is nothing to grcvent 
the Central Empire's annexing Rumania out and out : 
exploiting h^r soil and people as thoroughly as Prussia has 
exploited thbse parts of Poland which Frederick the Great 
annexed. 
When you have achieved a military decision in its complete 
form, or by any means destroyed your opponent's armed forces, 
then you can do what you will with that opponent — and 
this, by the way, should be borne in mind in the West also 
when people talk of terms that might be negotiated with the 
enemy ; for if we ultimately defeat his armies we can arrange 
all his immediate future at our will. 
There was nothing, I say, to prevent terms far harsher— 
up to the complete extinction of the nation. But what 
Prussia has done in this case is an excellent 'proof of her 
general policy. It is a strong support of that thesis which 
I maintained in these columns some months ago, when I 
described the Great Central State which is coming into being 
before our eyes, and which, if it stands, will be the great 
practical result of the Prussian victory and the abs(jlutely 
certain decline of all the West. 
This Rumanian Peace shows Prussia to be bent upon a 
Federal arrangement, and, in conjunction with the treatment 
of Bulgaria, shows that the process of Federalism is to be 
carefully established in various degrees. 
Prussia desires — very wisely — an extension not of an 
absolute tyranny, but of that Federal system upon which 
Bismarck and his advisers constructed the modern German 
Empire and towards which by a parallel movement the 
Hapsburgs were moving in the generation before the war. 
She conceives of a great Central State which meets modem 
conditions by the recognition of local feehng, which sacrifices 
just the necessary minimum of her own power to that local 
feeling ; which sacrifices more and more of her power in 
proportion as the new State falling beneath her sway is 
stronger or more distant or has better natural defences. 
At such a price will Prussia obtain the reality of power, 
which is principally mihtary, and after that, economic and 
social. ■ 
Such a system jwould be resilient and strong. Such a 
system would gather into one mass so large a body of men 
and resources, so situated upon the map, and moved by such 
a poHtical will at the centre, tiiat the crude and repulsive 
culture developed by modern North Germany in its attempted 
imitation of older and better things would certainly master 
Europe. Its social experiments would be used as models in 
the West ; its hterature (supposing it capable of producing 
one) would debase that of the West ; its morals, particularly 
in the negation of chivalry, would destroy the traditions of 
the West. 
I do not say that such a degradation would be long-lived. 
It would bring about its own breakdown, but with that, 
ours as well. And Europe would re-enter after a complete 
decline some slow and difficult process of reconstruction such 
as marked the Dark Ages. 
That is the matter in its largest aspect. Now let us turn 
to the particular point of Federalism, which is the gist of 
this article. 
Up to i8t6, under what may be called "the eighteenth- 
century system" of extending political power, Prussia simply 
annexed. She annexed her share of Poland and, after 
losing it at the hands of the French soldiers, had it restored 
to her upon their defeat. She annexed the territories of the 
Rhine, the Bishoprics of Treves, and Cologne, and Munster, and 
Pardeborn, and a whole belt lying to the south of Branden- 
burg, mainly carved out of what had formerly been the 
Electorate of Saxony ; and she annexed the northern comer 
of Pomerania and the Island of Rugen. 
If you look at the map beginning after the Thirty Years'. 
War at the end of the seventeenth century and Ccirrying it 
on into the nineteenth, you find the territory directly ruled 
by the HohenzoUems perpetually growing until from a 
single small territory it comes to cover much more than the 
half of North Germany and a great portion of Poland as well. 
Now, in the second and third quarters of the nineteenth 
century this original method of brute annexation was out- 
lived. It still obtained (for Prussia was slow to learn) as late 
as 1864-6, when the great mass of Hanover and Schleswig 
and Holstein were annexed together with Nassau and Hesse- 
Cassel and the free town of Frankfort, linking up Hanover 
with the Rhine provinces. Bur already the power of local 
feeling, the strength of what is called in its largest form 
Nationality and in its smallest Provincial Life, was recog- 
nised as an invincible force. At the same time Prussia 
desired to do her work quickly, and therefore to obtain the 
consent of those whom she would subject. It became the 
policy, therefore, of Bismarck and his advisers to envisage 
the future of the Hohenzollern supremacy upon a Federal 
basis. 
The German Empire of 1 870-1 was the creation of that 
idea. Very wide local powers indeed were left to any district 
which would admit the mastery of Prussia. In the case of 
a large and powerful State such as Bavaria there was allowed 
what looked at first like complete autonomy — even miUtary — 
with no restrictions save the common economic arrange- 
ments, postal, tariff, etc. ; the common higher military 
command of the General Empire and the common accept- 
ance of the HohenzoUems as hereditary Emperors above 
the Federation. It is not perhaps appreciated here how 
much a Bavarian still feels himself to be rather a Bavarian 
under his own Bavarian King than a subject or member of 
the new artificial Empire. 
The same truth applied to the commercial and in part 
international financial oligarchy of Hamburg, to Saxony, 
and to the lesser States. The realities of power fell increas- 
ingly to Prussian hands. The new German Empire was not 
a German Empire at all ; it was a Prussian arrangement. 
But the Federal type of that arrangement was the great 
and startHng innovation of the moment and the mark of 
what the future was to be. Even when Alsace and Lorraine 
were annexed, the booty was put in commission, as it were, 
and the stolen territory held in trust for the Empire as a 
whole. In practice, it is Prussian. Every subject of oppres- 
sion in Alsace-Lorraine talks of the "Prussian" not of the 
"German" master. It is a Prussian system and a Prussian 
control ; but it is not called Prussian territory — it is called 
" Imperial " territory. 
Parallel with this movement in North Germany, which 
was the aggrandisement of Prussia, went a movement in the 
dominions of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine— Austria- 
Hungary. It was provoked by the revolt of the Magyars, 
and at first supported by those natural tendencies towards 
local autonomy which go with conservatism. But the real 
development of the system was potential rather than actual. 
It was a programme not yet realised when the war broke 
out ; it was an idea already accepted at Vienna ; disliked, 
but perhaps thought inevitable at Budapest ; well on its way 
to realisation, and probably, had he not been assassinated, 
to have been realised by the then heir to the throne. This 
idea was to give very large local autonomy to the Slav depen- 
dencies of the German reigning House. The Emperor was. 
in theory, King of Bohemia. It was thought possible to 
