A Threatening Outlook by L. A. S.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 27, 1903

A Threatening Outlook

By L. A. S.

“The Coming War” is the heading of an editorial article in the Chicago Tribune of January 18, in which is pointed out the prospect of the breaking out of the long-expected European conflict on the Russo-German frontier. According to “Quidam,” a writer who expresses his views in the January Contemporary Review, says the Tribune, the great war which has been “looming on the horizon” of Europe for the last fifteen years, will be a conflict not between Russia and England, but between Russia and Germany. It will be, he says, “a life and death struggle, which will prove unparalleled in the world’s history for its magnitude and for its far-reaching consequences.”

“During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870,” says the editor of the Tribune, “Russia refrained from intervention, and

supposed that it would thereby earn Bismarck’s gratitude. A decade later Bismarck displayed an excessively queer don-kind of gratitude by helping to block Russia’s progress toward Constantinople. From that time on, says ‘Quidam,’ both the Russian and German governments have understood that their respective interests were irreconcilable. General Skobeleff said, ‘The battle is unavoidable between German and Slav; it will be long, bloody, and terrible, but the Slav will triumph.’”

Germany, it is pointed out, has reason to fear Panslavism, since there are no less than twenty-two million Slavs in Austria-Hungary, and there has been Panslavic agitation almost continuously in Europe since 1848, the date of the first Panslavic congress. If European Turkey should pass under Russian control, the next step would be the absorption of the Slavic portions of Austria-Hungary; and St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Prague would be strongholds in a Russian circle drawn about Berlin. The Tribune editor notes that “two thirds of the Russian European army is massed in Warsaw, Vilna, and Kief, within a few miles of the German frontier. The Teuton and the Slav are where they can easily get at each other.”

Whether between Slav and Teuton, or between Slav and Anglo-Saxon, or in some way not yet anticipated, the long-threatened European conflict shall break out, is not an essential question. Human forecasts may be mistaken on this point, but there is no mistaking the fact that the conflict is impending, that it must come somehow, and come soon. The omens of it are everywhere visible; on every hand conditions are seen to be ripening for the clash of arms. On every hand things are so prepared that a spark of war may start a general conflagration. As God’s Word has declared it would be, so it is; the winds of strife are ready to blow upon the earth, and would blow to-day did not divine power still hold them in check. Thus are we constantly admonished to push forward to the completion of our appointed work, ere the winds of war shall be loosened, and peace take its final departure from the earth.

L. A. S.