THE WORLD WAR I Before Sarajevo: Underlying Causes of the War BY SIDNEY BRADSHAW FAY PROFESSOR OF MODERN EUROPEAN HISTORY IN SMITH COLLEGE New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1929 All rights reserved COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. - Set up and electrotyped. Replacing 716089 GIFT Printed in the United States of America by WHEN the World War suddenly set Europe aflame and American public opinion, soon under the influence of propaganda and war prejudice, began to denounce Germany and the Kaiser as being guilty of causing it, the present writer refused to join in the chorus. His historical sense told him that in this present case, as in the past, no one country or no one man was solely, or probably even mainly, to blame A little study of the documents in the Blue, Yellow and Orange Books which were early issued by the English, French and Russian Governments quickly convinced him. that these documentary publications were by no means so complete and reliable (though more so than the White and Red Books, issued by Germany and Austria) that one could safely base sound and final conclusions upon them, as seemed to be believed by the millions of men and women who read such facile and superficial arguments as those of Mr. James M. Beck, and others who followed his cue. Therefore the present writer during the War remained silent, except for his discussions of the subject in college class rooms. When, however, the new socialist governments of Germany and Austria published in 1919 a very complete collection of documents from the secret archives relating to the diplomatic crisis of July, 1914, this seemed to provide material for reaching at last some tentative opinion about the immediate causes of the War. These the present writer ventured to express in "New Light on the Origins of the War" published in the American Historical Review in M664554 1920-1921. This called to the attention of scholars in this country the desirability of reconsidering opinions formed during the heat of the battle as to the immediate responsibility of causing it. With the publication of more documents, especially from the Russian sources, and with the refusal of the French and British Governments to issue any such convincingly complete documentary record of their conduct in July, 1914, there soon arose a group of writers who demanded a "revision" of that clause in the Treaty of Versailles declaring that Germany and her allies were solely responsible. With some of these writersespecially with some of the anti-Poincaré revisionists in France the pendulum of opinion has been in danger of swinging nearly as far away from the golden mean of historical truth as in the case of those who formerly followed in the propagandist path of Mr. Beck. The present writer is no more inclined to accept the arguments of the former than of the latter. In the pages which follow he has no political motive, either to justify the Treaty of Versailles or to demand its revision but simply to carry out what a great master has defined as the proper task of the historian-to tell how it really came about. He has written, he hopes, sine ira ac studio. If he has made infrequent citations from the mass of controversial literature which has grown up in regard to the origin of the war, this is not because he has not read a very considerable part of it, but because he wishes to avoid controversy and reach his conclusions as far as possible from documentary evidence. The mass of documentary and autobiographical material is now so great that it affords either of two possibilities. On the one hand, a writer by centering attention on the acts of any one man or country, and by picking out passages in the documents to support his contention, can easily make a seemingly convincing argument for the uninitiated, that this or that man or country |