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GERMANY AND ENGLAND 
 
GERMANY AND 
 ENGLAND 
 
 By Jf A^ CRAMB, M.A. 
 
 LATE PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY, QUEEN'S COLLEGE, LONDON 
 
 INTRODUCTION BY THE 
 
 HON. JOSEPH H. CHOATE 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. BUTTON & CO., Publishers 
 
 I914 
 
.C T, 
 
 Copyright, 19 14 
 
 BY 
 
 E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 OCT 19 1914 
 
 Ube TRnfcfterbocftcr press, "Wew Igorft 
 
 ©G1,A380946 
 
 0^ 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 This little book is one that every American should 
 read, because it is not only a gem in itself, and 
 worthy to be placed among English Classics for 
 its clearness of thought and expression, its re- 
 strained eloquence, and its broad historical knowl- 
 edge, but because it explains very lucidly, not 
 the occasion, but the cause (the deep-seated cause) 
 of the present war. 
 
 The occasion, so greedily seized upon by Ger- 
 many, was the refusal of Servia to yield to the 
 impossible ultimatum of Austria. Austria and 
 Servia, and the loudly proclaimed racial conflict 
 between Slav and Serb, have already vanished 
 from the scene and are of little account now. The 
 real cause, as shown by Professor Cramb, is the 
 intense hatred of Germany for England, and her 
 lofty ambition to establish a world empire upon 
 the ruins of the British Empire. 
 
 Since the days of Frederick the Great, while 
 England, largety by force of a^ ms, has been extend- 
 ing her imperial power all over the world, so that, 
 as justly described by Webster, she had become 
 **a power which has dotted over the surface of 
 the whole globe with her possessions and military 
 
vi INTRODUCTION 
 
 posts; whose morning drum-beat, following the 
 sun and keeping company with the hours, circles 
 the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain 
 of the martial airs of England," Germany has 
 remained cooped up within her narrow boundaries, 
 with inadequate access to the sea, and without 
 room for her rapidly increasing population. 
 "England's mere existence as an Empire has be- 
 come a continuous aggression" to Germany, and 
 her proud claim to be mistress of the seas a per- 
 petual affront. 
 
 Meanwhile, Prussia, under the lead of the 
 Hohenzollems, has become the master of all 
 Germany, and, simultaneously with the humilia- 
 tion of France in 1870, established the German 
 Empire, which, however, still remains an inland 
 empire. But all the while she has been building 
 up, quietly but steadily, her naval and military 
 power, so as to be ready when the hour should 
 strike, and has succeeded in creating, in her army, 
 a military machine of boundless numbers and of 
 almost invincible power, to cope with and to crush, 
 if possible, the combined forces of all the other 
 nations of Europe. 
 
 Long ago Prussia had established intellectual 
 dominion over the whole of Germany, the influence 
 of which extended among all nations. In this 
 intellectual progress Germany has rendered vast 
 services and maintained a leadership "in all the 
 phases and departments of human life and energy, 
 
INTRODUCTION vii 
 
 in religion, poetry, science, art, politics, and social 
 endeavor." 
 
 Step by step with this wonderful development, 
 Germany has cherished what Professor Cramb 
 designates as "a dream of world dominion," not 
 simply of a material dominion, but of a spiritual 
 one, which shall make the German mind, the 
 German genius, and the German character prevail 
 over all the world. To this end her poets, her 
 orators, her historians, her publicists and poli- 
 ticians have been for the last forty years per- 
 petually drilling into the minds and hearts of the 
 German people, of all classes from the Kaiser to 
 the peasant, the duty and the necessity of achiev- 
 ing this lofty and mighty ambition for their great 
 country. And they have been biding their time, 
 silently, patiently, conscientiously, to accomplish 
 it when the opportunity should come. 
 
 But there was, and is, one insuperable obstacle 
 in the way of this magnificent dream of a future 
 world empire for Germany, and that is the accom- 
 plished, existing, actual world empire of Great 
 Britain, of which England is the heart ; and unless 
 this obstacle can be removed, so that it shall never 
 stand in the way again, the grand ideal of Ger- 
 many's future can never be reaHzed. 
 
 Professor Cramb attempts to give a description 
 in a single sentence of the general aim of British 
 imperialism as it exists to-day, in these words: 
 *'To give all men within its bounds an English 
 
viii INTRODUCTION 
 
 mind; to give all who come within its sway the 
 power to look at the things of man's life, at the 
 past, at the future, from the standpoint of an 
 Englishman; to diffuse within its bounds that 
 high tolerance in religion which has marked this 
 empire from its foundation; that reverence yet 
 boldness before the mysteriousness of life and 
 death characteristic of our great poets and our 
 great thinkers; that love of free institutions, that 
 pursuit of an ever-higher justice and a larger free- 
 dom which, rightly or wrongly, we associate with 
 the temper and character of our race wherever it 
 is dominant and secure." And he adds "This 
 conception outlives the generations. Like an 
 immortal energy it links age to age. This imdy- 
 ing spirit is the true England, the true Britain, 
 for which men strive and suffer in every zone and 
 in every era, which silently controls their actions 
 and shapes their character like an inward fate — 
 * England. ' It is this which gives hope in hopeless 
 times, imparting its immortal vigor to the states- 
 man in his cabinet and to the soldier in the 
 field." 
 
 If this be a true presentation of the contest now 
 existing, as I believe it to be, it is truly an imperial 
 contest between the German Empire of the future, 
 that is to be won only by war, and this British 
 Empire, whose chief interest now and in all the 
 future is peace throughout the world. It is a 
 life and death struggle between two mighty powers, 
 
INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 each entitled to the respect and admiration of the 
 onlooking world. 
 
 In the last twenty years there appear to have 
 grown up in the German mind certain ideas about 
 England, which have no foundation in truth and 
 which are now being tested, with a startling sur- 
 prise to Germany: that the British Empire is 
 ready to fall to pieces of its own weight and of its 
 own age; that England, having tasted the sweets 
 of empire, is destined to give way and Germany to 
 have its turn; that the individual Englishman is 
 degenerate and effeminate, softened by luxury 
 and indulgence, and is no longer a fighter. 
 
 Thus it appears that the terrible contest is 
 maintained on both sides, not only with equal 
 valor and with equal vigor, but with equal con- 
 scientiousness and equally lofty motives, although 
 the object of one is to destroy and of the other to 
 create. The world looks on with divided sym- 
 pathies, and with hope or doubt as to the result, 
 according to such sympathies. Germany has 
 many enemies, but England is "the enemy of 
 enemies,'* the only one that counts now; and so 
 England has many enemies, but Germany to-day 
 is all in all among them. 
 
 The actual conflict has gone far enough, one 
 would think, to disabuse Germany of some of its 
 ideas about England. Instead of her empire being 
 ready to fall to pieces by the dropping off of her 
 colonies, armies are marching to her aid from all 
 
X INTRODUCTION 
 
 her dominions beyond the seas, apparently ready 
 to fight for her life with as ardent patriotism as 
 the regular British soldier; and instead of any 
 flinching or holding back on the part of the individ- 
 ual Englishman, they are all, to a man, rushing to 
 the support of the colors, or already engaged in the 
 terrible conflict on the Aisne and the Mame with a 
 courage worthy of the field of Agincourt. 
 
 Whereas Germany was led to believe that the 
 race of the days of Cromwell and of Milton had 
 passed away with them, it now reappears upon the 
 scene with all its ancient courage and virtue. 
 
 There is no disguising the fact that the sym- 
 pathies and hopes of the great mass of English- 
 speaking people everywhere are with England 
 and her allies now, although America is still a 
 warm and faithful friend of both these great 
 nations, and pledged to absolute neutrality. 
 
 Germany by its gross and admitted violation of 
 all treaties in its hostile entrance upon Belgian 
 soil was first in the field; — but England had had 
 full warning of what the nature of the coming 
 contest would be, to which her Government and 
 people might well have given more instant and 
 constant heed. As Professor Cramb shows, at 
 that great meeting in Albert Hall in 1900, Lord 
 Salisbury, then the greatest of her statesmen, 
 gave the solemn warning to his people *'in his 
 appeal to Englishmen to arm and prepare them- 
 selves for war, for a war which may be on them 
 
INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 at any hour, a war for their very existence as a 
 nation and as a race.'* And Lord Roberts, the 
 greatest of her Hving soldiers to-day, has continual- 
 ly repeated the same admonition for the past eight 
 years. The confident expectation of Englishmen 
 that the British navy would always be her all- 
 sufficient safeguard, has failed, but the obstinate 
 valor of her soldiers is nobly supplying the default. 
 America may well be grateful to Professor 
 Cramb, whose imtimely death preceded the com- 
 mencement of the war, for his thrilling explanation 
 of its origin and cause, and we have much to learn 
 from his serious and forceful warning. As he 
 very clearly explains, what is now going on is a 
 contest for the empire of the world, and we have 
 no use for empire. But if we really wish for peace 
 against all hazards, we must ever strengthen our 
 navy, and train every youth in the Republic, as 
 he approaches manhood, to such extent as shall 
 qualify him to be converted into an efficient soldier 
 at the shortest notice. Whenever war has come 
 upon us in the past, we have never been prepared 
 for it. That this may never happen again is my 
 earnest hope, as a lifelong lover of peace. 
 
 Joseph H. Choate. 
 
 Stockbridge, 
 8 October, 1914. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION BY THE HON. JOSEPH H. CHOATE V 
 
 LECTURE I 
 THE PROBLEM 
 
 I. ENGLISH INDIFFERENCE TO GERMAN HIS- 
 TORY AND LITERATURE ... I 
 
 II. SIGNIFICANCE OF "dEUTSCHLAND UND DER 
 
 NACHSTE KRIEG" .... 9 
 
 III. ORIGINS OF THE ANTAGONISM BETWEEN 
 
 GERMANY AND ENGLAND . . . I8 
 
 IV. THE INDICTMENT OF THE ENGLISH EMPIRE 26 
 V. SHALL A GERMAN EMPIRE SUCCEED IT? . 36 
 
 VI. LORD Salisbury's warning ... 39 
 
 LECTURE II 
 
 PEACE AND WAR 
 
 I. England's offers and Germany's re- 
 sponse ...... 46 
 
 ii. the ideal of pacificism ... 52 
 
 xiii 
 
xiv CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 III. CONCEPTIONS OF WAR IN THE PAST . . 58 
 
 IV. THE IDEAL ELEMENT IN WAR AND IN ENG- 
 
 LAND'S WARS FOR EMPIRE ... 62 
 
 V. VIEW OF WAR IN MODERN GERMANY . 70 
 
 LECTURE III 
 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 
 
 I. HEINRICH VON TREITSCHKE ... 75 
 
 II. HIS REPRESENTATIVE POSITION . . 78 
 
 III. TREITSCHKE, ,MACAULAY, AND CARLYLE . 82 
 
 IV. HIS CAREER ...... 87 
 
 V. HIS INFLUENCE AND GOVERNING IDEAS . 98 
 
 VI. HIS ATTITUDE TOWARDS ENGLAND AND 
 
 HER EMPIRE 102 
 
 LECTURE IV 
 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 I. POSSIBILITY OF HISTORICAL FORECASTS . IO9 
 
 II. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF EMPIRES . II5 
 
 III. THE PAST OF GERMANY, AND HER EMPIRE 
 
 IN THE FUTURE. . . . .120 
 
 IV. NAPOLEONISM IN GERMANY . . . I30 
 V. THE ENGLISH CONCEPTION OF EMPIRE . I35 
 
 VI. THE ISSUE FOR ENGLAND . . . I43 
 
GERMANY AND 
 ENGLAND 
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 THE PROBLEM 
 
 The purpose of these lectures demands perhaps 
 at the outset some explanation. First of all, I 
 disclaim any intention to provoke or foster hostile 
 feeling between Englishmen and Germans. My 
 aim, rather, is to contribute, as far as one can 
 by encoiu-agement and exhortation, to a mutual 
 understanding between those of the two countries 
 whom my words may reach. But the forces 
 which determine the actions of empires and great 
 nations are deep hidden and not easily affected 
 by words or even by feelings of hostility or friend- 
 ship. They lie beyond the wishes or intentions 
 of the individuals composing those nations. They 
 may even be contrary to those wishes and those 
 intentions. Individual friendship or hate has a 
 very fugitive and uncertain influence on war and 
 
2 THE PROBLEM 
 
 peace; and the good or evil will, even of great 
 numbers of private persons, has little effect on the 
 ultimate motives that control the actions of 
 States. It may be questioned whether in the 
 twentieth century any plebiscite would ever be in 
 favour of war. At the time of the Fashoda inci- 
 dent there were probably in France as many 
 individual Frenchmen who entertained kindly feel- 
 ings towards individual Englishmen as there are 
 private persons entertaining such feelings to-day 
 under the Entente Cordiale ; and they had probably 
 just as much influence on the reciprocal relations 
 of the two governments. The history of the 
 Republics of Hellas and of Italy is but a large 
 comment on this theme. You may study its 
 amplification in the two greatest philosophic 
 historians of all time — Thucydides and Machia- 
 velli. Napoleon understood this. "Politics is 
 Destiny/' he said on one occasion. "La politique, 
 c'est la fatalite." 
 
 What then is my purpose? I answer in the 
 words of a German historian, "To see things as 
 in very deed they are." The prayer of Ajax in 
 the dire extremity of the Greeks at Troy was for 
 light that he might see his enemy's face. It is a 
 noble prayer. What other prayer should be 
 England's now? 
 
 The object, therefore, which I have immediately 
 in view is to stress the value, if not the necessity, 
 to Englishmen of a deeper understanding of 
 
THE NEED OF UNDERSTANDING 3 
 
 Germany, a deeper understanding of that great 
 nation's political temper, its history, the motives 
 of the actors who, in the past, have seemed to 
 control that history; the development of its insti- 
 tutions and its laws, its poetry and its literature — 
 ever the highest instructors in the aspirations of a 
 race^; its present dreams and their relations to its 
 past disillusionments or defeats. For in the 
 history of nations there is a Fate, an inexorable 
 nexus of things, which constantly arrests and con- 
 stantly eludes our scrutiny, making the sequence 
 of events in the history of such a people now seem 
 inevitable as some dark and purposeful drama, 
 now controlled by laws more akin to Nature and 
 the elements than to the motives of human action. 
 Whether we regard Germany as a friend or as a 
 foe, the aims and ideals of that nation, some ephem- 
 eral, some so deeply rooted in the past that they 
 are beyond the power of the present to modify, 
 are the aims and ideals which must singularly 
 affect England in the present and are likely to con- 
 
 ^ There is no such stainless mirror of a nation's soul as German 
 literature. In every age it is racy of German earth, going the 
 round of its rivers and mountains and valleys. In the thirteenth 
 century it is in Thuringia, the feudal castles; in the sixteenth, 
 Saxony gives its tone to Reformation literature and hymns; the 
 varied art of Silesia dominates the seventeenth, as that of Suabia 
 the eighteenth century. Romanticism has its home in Berlin ; the 
 fatalism of Vienna and Munich succeeds "Young Germany"; and 
 in the twentieth century Berlin again leads in this, one of the 
 greatest of world-literatures. 
 
4 THE PROBLEM 
 
 tinue to effect England, beyond those of any other 
 nation, for several generations to come. 
 
 If Germany is our enemy of enemies, if the 
 twentieth century is to witness such a conflict for 
 empire as that of England against France in the 
 eighteenth century, or against Spain in the six- 
 teenth, what is more imperative than that we 
 should understand the spiritual as well as the 
 material resources of that enemy, than that we 
 should seek to discover the hidden foundations 
 of its strength and probe the most secret motives 
 of its actions, the characterizing traits of its policy, 
 the deep convictions which mould the history of 
 the nation? For with nations as with individuals, 
 it is character that counts; he that wills greatly, 
 conquers greatly. 
 
 If, on the other hand, Germany is to be Eng- 
 land's friend, perhaps even her ally, if blood indeed 
 be thicker than water, then perfect mutual un- 
 derstanding, the earnest scrutiny of our separate 
 aspirations as they emerge from our separate 
 pasts, can only strengthen that friendship and 
 render that alliance more enduring. For there is 
 no surer basis of friendship, whether between 
 individuals or nations, than the sympathy that is 
 born of knowledge and the knowledge that, in 
 turn, is produced by sympathy. 
 
 Yet how far from that knowledge and how in- 
 different to its attainment are the majority of 
 Englishmen in these times! Germany has one of 
 
NEGLECT OF GERMAN LITERATURE 5 
 
 the greatest and most profound schools of poetry 
 — ^yet how many Englishmen have the secret of 
 its high places or access to its templed wonders? 
 Since the decline of Alexandria there has been no 
 such group of daring thinkers as those of Germany 
 in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth cen- 
 turies; yet to most English men and women the 
 "Critique of Pure Reason" and the larger version 
 of Hegel's ''Logic" are sealed as the ''Enneads" 
 of Plotinus. 
 
 Merely as an unexampled opportunity for the 
 study of the soul of a people why should England 
 neglect this literature? Why in 1913 should the 
 following characteristic incident be even possible? 
 A few weeks ago the head master of one of our 
 public schools exhumed a letter of the late Mr. 
 Gladstone, in which that eminent politician cast 
 a slur upon the whole of German literature, de- 
 nouncing the author of ' 'Faust' ' and of ' ' Iphigenie * ' 
 as an immoral writer in whose works we find vir- 
 tue banished and self-indulgence reigning. Yet 
 Goethe is, perhaps, the most serene artist in words 
 since Sophocles, and amongst the children of men 
 not one has striven with a loftier purpose to divine, 
 even though darkly, the bond of the Many and 
 the One, and thus to justify the ways of God to 
 man and of man to God. That in the welter of 
 literary opinions, published and unpublished, of 
 the late Mr. Gladstone, such a verdict on Goethe 
 and on German literature should exist is not 
 
6 THE PROBLEM 
 
 astonishing. The astonishing thing is that in the 
 second decade of the twentieth century an English- 
 man should have been found who, having exhumed 
 such a verdict, did not from very shame instantly 
 cover it again in complete oblivion. Instead of 
 this, he incontinently published it in the ** Times," 
 not once only, but in two different issues. The 
 publication of this letter is discreditable at once 
 to the critic, to the exhumer, to the press and to 
 the nation. 
 
 I have neither the wish nor the hope that every 
 Englishman should become a master of the Ger- 
 man language and a learned student of the philo- 
 sophy or the poetry of Germany, its history or its 
 politics. My ambition is more modest. It is 
 the hope that during the next few decades there 
 may gradually arise here in England a wall, as 
 it were, of cultured opinion, which should make 
 the blunt enunciation of such judgments by a 
 prominent politician all but impossible by the 
 ridicule to which they would at once expose him, 
 and their ratification by the head master of one 
 of our public schools absolutely unthinkable. 
 
 I have no desire to labour the point, but it is 
 difficult to pass in silence some of the most glaring 
 instances of our indifference even at the universi- 
 ties to German history and therefore to German 
 politics. Not a page of Treitschke's greatest 
 work has been translated; yet his history of the 
 first stages of Prussia's wrestle for supremacy, 
 
A LITTLE LEARNING 7 
 
 his literary essays and his lectures on political 
 theory, excite a more ardent curiosity in modern 
 Germany than the essays and the history of Macau- 
 lay did in mid-Victorian England. Giesebrecht's 
 great history of the early Empire, with its vivid 
 portraiture of the tragic figures of the Saxon and 
 the Suabian lines, is still inaccessible to all but a 
 small minority of Englishmen; and its companion 
 work, a masterpiece at once in erudition and in 
 thought, as well as one of the most alluring of 
 books, the " Verfassungsgeschichte " of Georg 
 Waitz — ^are there fifty Englishmen living who have 
 turned its grave and weighty pages or even heard 
 its name? It would be easy to multiply instances ; 
 for German scholarship has not left a single period 
 in its annals unillumined by some work which is 
 marked by distinction or power and yet remains 
 untranslated into English. 
 
 Yet of Germany beyond most nations it holds 
 good that he who would understand its present 
 or its immediate future must be content patiently 
 to search for the key to its hieroglyphics in the 
 past; and, above all, he who would estimate at 
 their true significance the regret for missed op- 
 portunities of empire and the hopes of redeeming 
 those opportunities which flit before the imagina- 
 tion of thinkers like Treitschke, or soldiers like 
 Bernhardi, must feel the spell which the shadowy 
 grandeur of the lost empire of the Ottonides and 
 the Hohenstaufen still exercises over the mind of 
 
8 THE PROBLEM 
 
 every German not sunk in sloth or chained to 
 self-interest. 
 
 And the average Englishman, thus denied by 
 his ignorance of the language all access to this 
 deeper knowledge — to what sources of information 
 does he trust? We know them well. There is, 
 for instance, the Radical member of Parliament 
 who, liberated from the cares of State, spends 
 three weeks in Berlin, consorts with members of 
 the Reichstag, and finds each and all of them 
 thoroughly well-disposed towards peace with all 
 men and with England in particular. What 
 scaremongers are these, he asks indignantly, who 
 talk of German ambitions or a German invasion? 
 Then there is the geographer and traveller who 
 spends a somewhat longer period in the towns and 
 villages of Brandenburg and West and East 
 Prussia, and returns aghast at the intensity of 
 hate which he found — at what he describes as 
 ^^the all but insane desire for war with England'* 
 which animates every class of society. There is, 
 again, the statistician who enumerates the mileage 
 of German railways and German canals, of Berlin 
 streets and Berlin drains; or, again, the English 
 officer of a type not yet obsolete, who, preparing 
 for the Intelligence Department of the War Office, 
 spends three months in Germany and finds in it 
 "a nation of damned professors." 
 
 Thus, seeking reality, we find only appear- 
 ance, and, pursuing knowledge, we gain only 
 
PURPOSE OF THE LECTURES 9 
 
 opinions — B65at, in the strictest Greek sense of that 
 term. 
 
 This, then, is my general purpose in these 
 lectures — to consider the deep strivings of German 
 history; to understand what are the forces which 
 are shaping the present in Germany, forces which 
 lie far deeper than such momentary ebullitions 
 of goodwill as were expressed a short time ago 
 by Admiral Tirpitz. These are but things of a 
 day. It is in the past of Germany that we must 
 seek the real springs of the future action of Ger- 
 many, whether that future be against England or 
 with England. 
 
 II 
 
 During the last few months there has been in 
 the hands of a large number of Englishmen and 
 of tens of thousands of Germans a very remarkable 
 book — a book which has sprung from those deeper 
 fountains of a nation's history to which I have 
 referred. It is a book written in German by a 
 distinguished cavalry soldier, General von Bern- 
 hardi, and it has for its title and subject matter 
 ''Germany and the Next War'* — " Deutschland 
 und der nachste Krieg" — a problematical war, 
 observe. What is the character of this work? 
 
 One of many similar books which during the 
 past ten or twelve years have been widely read 
 in Germany, it has an extraordinary interest for 
 us, and an interest of a many-sided kind. It is a 
 
10 THE PROBLEM 
 
 fair and a just book — according to the writer's 
 insight; soldier-like in its simpHcity, soldier-Hke 
 in its misdirected Hterary admirations. It has a 
 distinct significance, not only because of its mili- 
 tary criticism, but because of its knowledge of 
 German history and civilization; for General von 
 Bernhardi is something of a scholar as well as a 
 distinguished soldier.^ Like many German offi- 
 cers, he has attempted to understand not only his 
 profession as a soldier but the ''why" of that 
 profession ; studying the history, the literature, the 
 politics, and even the philosophy of his nation, 
 seeking the answer to the question: What is 
 Germany? 
 
 And by "Germany" he understands the vital, 
 onward-striving force flowing in German blood 
 from an endless time down to the present, and from 
 the present flowing onwards into an endless future. 
 What, he asks, is the precise value, the precise 
 significance of that force in its present mani- 
 festation — "Germany"? And he has a perfectly 
 definite answer: It is strife; it is war. And the 
 
 * I have selected General von Bernhardi's works not because 
 of any peculiar or distinctive value in them, but because, of all 
 that mass of literature from Treitschke to Delbriick, Schmoller, 
 and Maurenbrecher, they are the sole exemplars in Englishmen's 
 hands. For the rest, " Deutschland und der nachste Krieg, " like 
 Bernhardi's earlier writings, is characterized by a certain diffuse- 
 ness. He is a reader of Nietzsche, but his style shows not a trace 
 of that master's pointed and lucid manner. It has, however, the 
 merit of entire sincerity. 
 
WHAT IS GERMANY ? ii 
 
 direction of that strife? It is the isolation of 
 Russia by bribes; the destruction of the antago- 
 nistic force named France beyond the power of 
 raising her head; and thereafter Germany will be 
 face to face with the day of reckoning with England. 
 ''The Hour" to which German officers of a Chau- 
 vinist tendency drink, will then have struck. 
 
 In the history of nations we must count time 
 by decades or even by centuries. ^ Under change- 
 ful moods of furious declamatory anger, as in the 
 crisis of the Boer War, and under the mood of 
 momentary rapprochement of the present day in 
 the crisis of the reawakening of the national spirit 
 in France, this steady thought persists. That is 
 one interest of the book. There is, again, the 
 interest which centres in any attempt made by a 
 German to explain to himself England and Ger- 
 many in their relations to one another; and this 
 is one of the underlying thoughts throughout the 
 book. 
 
 Again, the book has the interest derived from 
 the fact that it represents a very strong trend of 
 German, and, above all, of Prussian opinion — that 
 accumulating mass of determined anti-Englishism. 
 It is useless to see in Bernhardi's book the expres- 
 sion of a morbid or heated Jingoism. It is no 
 rhapsody on war. Bernhardi is not a man who 
 takes any excessive pleasure in the contemplation 
 of war; on the contrary! But he is a man who 
 recognizes those darker, obscurer forces shaping 
 
12 THE PROBLEM 
 
 the destiny of nations. To him this war with 
 England is inevitable. And his book is sympto- 
 matic; that is to say, it represents the mood, the 
 conviction, the fervent faith, of thousands and 
 tens of thousands of Germans — Prussians, Saxons, 
 Suabians, Bavarians. 
 
 Its philosophy is derived from Nietzsche and 
 Treitschke. In its military character the book is, 
 like General von Bernhardi's other writings, emi- 
 nently up to date. But what marks out this work 
 from all others of the same kind, giving it some- 
 thing of the distinction of a really epoch-making 
 book, is that it represents a definite attempt made 
 by a German soldier to understand not merely 
 how Germany could make war upon England most 
 effectively, but why Germany ought to make war 
 upon England. It is in this respect that the book 
 focuses the thoughts of many German writers, 
 historians, thinkers, novelists, pamphleteers, who, 
 again and again, for quite the last forty years, 
 have bent their attention to this subject. 
 
 Is it possible to find any moral, any ethical 
 justification for a war upon England? The war 
 of 1870 with France was a war of great revenge, of 
 just revenge, and for one of the greatest of causes. 
 No war in history, perhaps, was ever more just 
 than the war which Bismarck and Moltke waged 
 against France. When she comes to this war upon 
 England, on the other hand, Germany is face to 
 face with the difficulty that here she has no such 
 
GERMANY'S INSTINCT FOR EMPIRE 13 
 
 motive of retributive justice or revenge. And 
 therefore you find a tendency to shape the question 
 thus: How do England and her Empire stand in 
 the path of the deepest desires and ambitions, and 
 perhaps, also, the highest and most sacred aspira- 
 tions of Germany? 
 
 If we ask what those desires, ambitions, and 
 aspirations are, the answer is this: Germany, not 
 less than England, it is contended, is dowered with 
 the genius for empire, that power in a race which, 
 like genius in the artist, must express itself or 
 destroy its possessor. An empire she once had, 
 centuries before France and England fought. 
 That empire is lost. But in the German race the 
 instinct for empire is as ancient and as deeply 
 rooted as it is in the English race; and in the 
 Germany of the present time, above all, this 
 instinct, by reason of the very strength of Germany 
 within herself, her conscious and vital energy, her 
 sense of deep and repressed forces, is not a mere 
 cloud in the brain, but is almost an imperious 
 necessity. This is the real driving-force in Ger- 
 man politics, the essential thing. 
 
 Hence the further question which young Ger- 
 many asks is the question which Treitschke asks: 
 At what point in her history did Germany swerve 
 from the path to empire? Can she again find 
 that path, or is it irrecoverably lost? Germany, 
 from her own inward resources, produces year by 
 year greater surplus energy, mental and physical, 
 
14 THE PROBLEM 
 
 than any other nation in the world; yet year by 
 year, by emigration to America, to England, and 
 to other lands, that surplus energy is lost to her. 
 Year by year are we to look on in impotent anger 
 or in apathy whilst the best and most enterprising 
 of oiir citizens quit the Fatherland and, living 
 under other governments, cease to be Germans, 
 bequeath their worth, that is to say their valour, 
 to those nations who may be ultimately Germany's 
 deadliest enemies? 
 
 These are the problems which, at the present 
 hour, press in upon the mind of every thinking 
 German. They have been the study of serious 
 historians like Oncken, Treitschke, Mommsen, 
 Sybel, even of Droysen. They are the questions 
 which find their answer in novelists, poets, publi- 
 cists and politicians. Pamphleteers like Eisenhart 
 and Bley here agree with men of academic rank 
 like Schmoller and Maurenbrecher, Franke, and 
 Miiller. 
 
 And the answer now given to the further ques- 
 tion. What stands in the way of those desires and 
 aspirations? is: Germany has one enemy. One 
 nation blocks the way. That nation is England. 
 
 Thirty years ago this answer was vague; but 
 since that period it has steadily grown more 
 distinct; and since 1898 and the formation of the 
 Navy League, since the South African War and 
 the extraordinary outburst of political and per- 
 sonal hatred against England at that time, it has 
 
ENGLAND BLOCKS THE WAY 15 
 
 grown still more precise. Not Russia or Austria, 
 unless secondarily, not France, unless incidentally, 
 is Germany's enemy: the enemy of enemies is 
 England. She bars the way to the realization of 
 all that is highest in German life. 
 
 The enemy having thus been ascertained, the 
 question which every German has to face is: Why 
 are we to submit to this? 
 
 It is true that amongst Germans of every rank 
 and class there are men willing to acknowledge 
 the part which England has played in the past, 
 who are perfectly willing to admire our Shake- 
 speare, our dramatists, some of our historians, 
 and are even willing to extend a kind of tolerant 
 contempt to some of our philosophers. But there 
 are Germans of another kind, men of the type of 
 Eisenhart and Bley, and, above all, of the type of 
 Treitschke, whose attitude towards England is to- 
 tally different. These men, as the justification for 
 this war, this "nachste Krieg," point to the broad 
 fact — broad enough, assuredly! — that the English 
 race is the possessor, '*by theft," as Treitschke de- 
 scribed it, of one-fifth of the habitable globe. And 
 they ask: "By what right? By the right first of 
 craft, then of violence!"^ German indignation 
 then takes the place of German analysis. Cooped 
 up between the North Sea and the Danube, the 
 
 * "In 1839, in the midst of a time of peace, the rock-nest of 
 Aden, the key to the Red Sea, the Gibraltar of the East, was 
 stolen." (Treitschke's "Deutsche Geschichte," vol. V., p. 63.) 
 
l6 THE PROBLEM 
 
 Rhine and the plains of Poland, conscious of our 
 strength, exerting an ever stronger pressure upon 
 our frontiers — can we or ought we, it is asked, to 
 acquiesce in England's possession of one-fifth of 
 the globe? Ought a patriotic German to submit to 
 seeing his nation depleted year by year? Can he, 
 on those conditions, retain his manhood or be true 
 to the religion of valour, the birthright of the 
 Teutonic kindred? It is very well for England to 
 protest that she has no aggressive designs against 
 Germany; England's mere existence as an empire 
 is a continuous aggression. So long as England, the 
 great robber-State, retains her booty, the spoils of 
 a world, what right has she to expect peace from 
 the nations? England possesses everything and 
 can do nothing. Germany possesses nothing and 
 could do everything. What edict then, human 
 or divine, enjoins us to sit still? For what are 
 England's title-deeds, and by what laws does she 
 justify her possession? By the law of valour, 
 indeed, but also by opportunity, treachery, and 
 violence. ^ 
 
 ^ It is impossible in Germany to ignore the force of literary and 
 academic ideas. Just such a series of irrelevant and inflam- 
 matory declamation, partly the work of the Tugendbund, partly 
 the work of men like Arndt and even Stein, preceded the rising 
 against Napoleon; and in a later decade just such a series pre- 
 ceded the war against Austria and the war against France. The 
 causes of the wars of 1866 and 1870 can be so treated as to appear 
 the work of professors and historians. What is Droysen's 
 "History " but a pamphlet in six volumes in which Prussia stands 
 
A SHIFTED QUESTION 17 
 
 In the time of Roon and Moltke the attitude of 
 Germans when the question of enmity to England 
 was discussed was always, "Is it possible to land 
 a German army upon English soil? And, once 
 landed there, how is it possible to bring it safely 
 back again with its plunder to the shores of the 
 Elbe and the Rhine?" What was argued was a 
 problem of abstract strategy, rather than of 
 political or national aim. 
 
 A generation has passed. The heroes of the 
 war of 1870 have one by one disappeared — Bis- 
 marck, Roon, Moltke, Manteuffel. That prob- 
 lem of strategy does still exist in Germany, but 
 it occupies a much less prominent place than it 
 occupied thirty or forty years ago. It seems to 
 have solved itself during the last ten or fifteen 
 years. It has become a secondary matter, and 
 the quasi-historical form which the question of 
 enmity to England now assumes in the minds of 
 thousands of intellectual Germans is this: As the 
 first great united action of the Germans as a 
 people, when they became conscious of their 
 power, was the overthrow of the Roman Empire, 
 and ultimately, in Charlemagne and the Ottonides, 
 the realization of the dream of Alaric — the trans- 
 figuration of the world, the subversion of Rome, 
 
 out as the model State? And the " French Revolution " of Sybel 
 is a counterpart of the writings of Droysen and Treitschke in its 
 arraignment of the French nation. 
 
i8 THE PROBLEM 
 
 and the erection upon its ruins of a new State ; so, 
 in the twentieth century, now that Germany under 
 the Hohenzollem has become conscious of her 
 new Hfe, shall her first great action be the over- 
 throw of that empire most corresponding to the 
 Roman Empire, which in the dawn of her history 
 she overthrew? In German history the old 
 Imperialism begins by the destruction of Rome. 
 Will the new Imperialism begin by the destruction 
 of England? 
 
 Ill 
 
 The ethico-political or moral origins of the 
 sentiment of antagonism between England and 
 Germany are thus obvious enough — the confron- 
 tation of two States, each dowered with the genius 
 for empire; the one, the elder, already sated with 
 the experience and the glories of empire ; the other, 
 the younger, apparently exhaustless in resources 
 and energy, baulked in mid-career by **fate and 
 metaphysical aid," and now indignant. 
 
 This is the moral, the most profound source of 
 antagonism; and its roots lie deep in European 
 history — German historians as widely apart in 
 mind as Kegel and Treitschke seeing the cause of 
 Germany's frustrate destiny in her pursuit of 
 ideal ends, of ''the freedom of the spirit"; in her 
 deep absorption in religion at the period when 
 England, Holland, France, Spain, fired by com- 
 
RELATIONS WITH PRUSSIA 19 
 
 mercialism, played against each other for the 
 dominion of this planet. This is clear: this is the 
 ethical, the permanent and the real cause. It has 
 the characteristics of all true causes: universality 
 and necessity. And it is worth while pausing at 
 this point to ask the question : What is its historical 
 genesis? 
 
 The unity of modem Germany is the work of 
 Prussia and the great Hohenzollem dynasty. 
 What are the stages in the evolution of the rela- 
 tions between England and Prussia? There are 
 four distinct phases: the period of Frederick the 
 Great, the Napoleonic, the mid-nineteenth century 
 and the later nineteenth century. 
 
 The definite relations of England and Prussia 
 as State to State are synchronous with the history 
 of Prussia as a kingdom; and in the first decades 
 the terms are those of friendship. The son of the 
 Great Elector, Frederick I, as first King of Prussia, 
 sends his contingent to support Marlborough and 
 Eugene. During Frederick the Great's time, Eng- 
 land's relations to Prussia, beginning in hostility, 
 owing to the sympathy of the English people 
 for Maria Theresa, and their enmity to France, 
 pass through a phase of variegated sullen friend- 
 ship and alliance, and end again, at least on 
 Frederick's part, in clear burning hostility and 
 contempt when the government of Lord Bute 
 abandons Prussia. Minor German historians have 
 dwelt much on 1762 and the "betrayal" of 
 
20 THE PROBLEM 
 
 Frederick by the Cabinet of St. James's in the 
 hour of his darkest fortunes.^ Frederick, in his 
 correspondence on the subject, does not spare the 
 character of Lord Bute; but he is too profound 
 an observer of the Hfe of States, and too frequent 
 a student of ''II Principe" and, above all, of 
 " Gli-Discorsi," not to know that alliances between 
 States are based on self-interest. 
 
 A generation passes. At the time of the Revo- 
 lutionary and Napoleonic wars, England is for 
 nearly eight years the enemy of Prussia, the enemy, 
 that is to say, of Napoleon's ally, or Napoleon's 
 tributary State. Then in 1813, 1814, and 1815, 
 England stands side by side with Prussia, and 
 this friendship is not interrupted during the Holy 
 Alliance, though it is easy to trace distrust and 
 misgiving in the attitude of actual Prussians or of 
 *' nationalized" Prussians, Prussians by sympathy 
 like Niebuhr and Stein. These die. "They see," 
 I have elsewhere said, "the world rushing upon 
 ruin; they see the unchaining of anarchy. But 
 what do they hope from England? England, 
 faster than all the rest, is plunging down the steep." 
 
 With the Revolution of February, 1848, with 
 1870 and 1875, it is possible already to discern the 
 
 ^'The "Annual Register," which began in 1758, is, in its first 
 numbers, full of proofs of the admiration felt by England for 
 the King of Prussia. The Buckingham Correspondence indicates 
 that Frederick's proud hostility was not to the nation, but to 
 Bute. 
 
RISE AND TRIUMPH OF PRUSSIA 21 
 
 rise of the present hostility. And the underiying 
 cause, the causa causans? It is interesting; it is 
 curious; it presents one of those movements, one 
 of those visible invisible ''curves" traced in the 
 Unseen, which in history affect the imagination 
 like the great achievements in art. The workshop 
 is flung open; we seem to witness the very opera- 
 tion of Fate; the Norns are weaving the destinies 
 of men. 
 
 This causa causans is not England. England 
 is passive. The active agent is Prussia. Stage 
 by stage from the days of the Great Elector Prussia 
 has risen, guarding each advance with a Roman 
 precision and care. Under her first two kings, 
 Frederick I and Frederick William I, as under 
 the Great Elector, Prussia is admirable in her 
 self-restraint. Her aim is to secure the territory 
 extorted from the Swedes at Fehrbellin and to 
 organize the new kingdom. She does not as yet 
 even come forward as Austria's antagonist, 
 despite ultra-Habsburg treachery, ultra-Habsburg 
 insolence. 
 
 Prussia strikes when her hour strikes, and in 
 1740, with the accession of Frederick the Great, 
 that hour does strike; and for the next twenty- 
 three years Prussia appears as the great rebel- 
 State, asserting herself triumphantly, measuring 
 herself in battle after battle against Austria and 
 Austria^s allies. All Europe cannot break her 
 spirit or the spirit of her king. 
 
22 THE PROBLEM 
 
 It is one of the lofty and exhilarating heroisms 
 of world-history, this conflict of reality against 
 empty formalism; of the substance of Frederick's 
 military State against that phantom, the Army of 
 the Empire ; of right and strength against boastful 
 weakness parading as power, unrighteous privi- 
 lege decking itself with the sanctity of history and 
 right. ^ 
 
 Nothing is more merciless than Frederick's 
 mockery of that venerable myth, the Holy Roman 
 Empire. We hear already Frosch's song in 
 ''Faust": 
 
 "Das Hebe, heil'ge, Rom'sche Reich 
 Wie halt's nur noch zusammen?" 
 
 If the conflict at times is tragic, as in 1759 it 
 becomes tragic, it is always heroic tragedy. 
 Frederick's poetry before Rossbach moves us as 
 the midnight talk of Achilles and Priam — the 
 sorrow and the heroism in things: 
 
 * Pour moi, menac^ du naufrage, 
 Je dois, en affrontant I'orage, 
 Penser, vivre et mourir en roi. " 
 
 ' "His statecraft bears on its face the stamp of his own kingly 
 frankness. In the conflicts of States he had regard only for 
 living things, for power skilfully utilized through rapid action. 
 He gave truth once more a place of honour in German politics." 
 (Treitschke's " Deutsche Geschichte," vol. I., pp. 49-50.) 
 
THE WAR OF LIBERATION 23 
 
 And again we have at once to admire Prussia's 
 irresistible and resolute advance and her strict re- 
 straint. Definitely she comes forward as Austria's 
 rival; but the hour for Austria's overthrow has 
 not yet come. Frederick's army and the entrain 
 of success might have led, after 1763, into wars 
 for world-empire which would have recalled those 
 of Louis XIV and anticipated those of Napoleon. 
 The king is not yet old — the age of Marlborough 
 at Blenheim, of Caesar at Munda. In Treitschke*s 
 theory, Frederick is conscious in himself of mili- 
 tary genius like that of Alexander, yet is con- 
 tent with Prussia. Even when such men as 
 Winterfelt or Dessau propose the Empire, he 
 answers them: "No; it would be too awkward a 
 burden." 
 
 Two generations pass. The War of Liberation 
 follows, investing Prussia with a glory such as the 
 war against Xerxes gave Athens. Bliicher, Stein, 
 Gneisenau, Schamhorst, Amdt, Komer, Fichte, 
 Kleist, Uhland, form a galaxy of heroism on 
 which, between 1815 and 1848, the imagination of 
 Yoimg Germany broods not less ardently than, in 
 an earlier generation, the contemporaries of Goethe 
 and Herder had studied in Plutarch the heroic 
 phantoms of Greece and of Rome. Then, when 
 a century has passed since Frederick's wars, the 
 task which, greatly daring, he declined, Prussia, 
 greatly, wisely daring, now can undertake. The 
 hour has once more struck. And at Sadowa and 
 
24 THE PROBLEM 
 
 at Metz, Worth and Sedan, she founds the new 
 German nation and the new German empire. ^ 
 
 What is to be the next stage? Germany after 
 1870 finds a greater strength and a sense of more 
 compHcated and intricate unity than she ever 
 possessed in the days of mediaeval ImperiaHsm; 
 and in the House of Hohenzollem the new nation 
 has found, in answer to all its aspirations, a dynasty 
 not less heroic, not less great than the Ottonides 
 or even the Hohenstaufen. 
 
 Now it is just at this moment in her history that 
 Germany comes sharp up against England, as in 
 the eighteenth century she comes up against 
 Austria, and in the nineteenth against France. 
 Yet in her past relations to England, Prussia, it 
 may seem at first, can find no cause, personal and 
 rancorous, such as animates her in 1760 or in 
 1870. From Austria and from France she had 
 endured insult upon insult, measureless humilia- 
 tions. But from England? 
 
 England's possessions, England's arrogance on 
 the seas, her claim to world-wide empire — these, 
 Germany answers, are to Germany an insult not 
 less humiliating than any she has met with in 
 her past. And what are these English preten- 
 sions? And upon what are they based? Not 
 upon England's supremacy in character or intel- 
 
 * Bismarck now is not content with Prussia; he is for empire, 
 though again temperate — "I wish to be an honest broker." 
 
ENGLAND'S BASELESS SUPREMACY 25 
 
 lect. For what is the character of this race which 
 thus possesses a fifth of the habitable globe and 
 stands for ever in the path of Germany^s course 
 towards her ''place in the sun/' in the path of 
 Germany's course towards empire? 
 
 It is from this first recrimination that, during 
 the last three or four decades, largely under the 
 influence of the Prussian School of History, there 
 has been evolved a portrait of England as the 
 great robber-State. In one phase or another this 
 conception is gradually permeating all classes, 
 making itself apparent now in a character in 
 fiction, now in a poem, now in a work of history 
 or economics, now in the lecture-hall at Bonn or 
 Heidelberg or Berlin, now in a political speech. 
 
 And the theme is precise. England's suprem- 
 acy is an unreality, her political power is as 
 hollow as her moral virtues; the one an arrogance 
 and pretence, the other hypocrisy. She cannot 
 long maintain that baseless supremacy. On the 
 sea she is rapidly being approached by other 
 Powers; her resources, except by immigration, 
 are almost stationary, and her very immigration 
 debases still further her resources. Her decline 
 is certain. There may be no war. The display 
 of power may be enough, and England after 1900, 
 like Venice after 1500, will gradually atrophy, 
 sunk in torpor. An England insensibly weakened 
 by brutalization within and the encroachments 
 of an ever-increasing aHen element, diseased or 
 
26 THE PROBLEM 
 
 criminal, and, by concession on concession with- 
 out, sinking into a subject province though nomi- 
 nally free, whilst Canada, South Africa, Australia, 
 New Zealand, carves out each its own destiny — 
 such an England is easily conceived. 
 
 Who is to succeed her? It may not be Ger- 
 many; some Power it must be. But if Germany 
 were to inherit the sceptre which is falling from 
 her nerveless hands . . . ? 
 
 And, having visualized this future, the German 
 imagination, in a tempest of envy or vehement 
 hate, becomes articulate and takes various shapes* 
 resulting in an almost complete arraignment of 
 the British Empire, of the English character, and 
 of all our institutions and all our efforts as an 
 empire-building race. 
 
 IV 
 
 First there is the general indictment of British 
 Imperialism as an influence upon humanity. You 
 acquired your empire, these critics say, by meas- 
 ureless treachery, violence, the perfidious foment- 
 ing of strife, and you have failed as an empire at 
 once in your colonies and in your dependencies. 
 Your colonies already shiver with impatience under 
 the last slight remnant of your yoke. The arro- 
 gance or the clumsiness of some beef-witted minis- 
 ter will alienate Canada or Australia exactly as 
 the clumsiness of the Graf tons, the Norths, the 
 
AN ARRAIGNMENT 27 
 
 Grenvilles, between 1763 and 1775, alienated the 
 New England States. 
 
 Then the German Cultur-Imperialisten, not un- 
 affected probably by the study of Mommsen or of 
 Curtius, certainly strongly influenced by the study 
 of Dahn and Nietzsche, arraign the century and a 
 half of our rule in India. ''Your dominion," they 
 say, ''has been retrograde and obscurantist. India 
 is not only the Italy of Asia ; it is not only the land 
 of romance, of art and beauty. It is in religion 
 earth's central shrine. India is religion. Yet 
 what consciousness of this have Englishmen ever 
 exhibited? You came to India with an opium 
 pipe in one hand and a Bible in the other. India, 
 seeking dreams, accepted with the passion of de- 
 spair the opium; it gave her dreams. Your Bible 
 she rejected with measureless contempt, and she 
 awoke from her opium sleep to fasten her eyes and 
 her soul with new ardour, new adoration, on the 
 great scriptures of her race. Yet the officers of 
 your army and your civil administrators are in- 
 capable of reading a page of those scriptures. 
 Instead of seizing the opportunity of a new and 
 great religious experiment, you, the conquerors — 
 borrowers of your own religion — have come to the 
 most original race of this planet and asked them 
 to borrow from the borrowers ! 
 
 "With what contempt for the conquerors must 
 not the Brahmin, sunk in the studies of those vast 
 and austere conceptions which by the vanished 
 
e8 THE PROBLEM 
 
 stream of the Saraswati first allured the human 
 soul, rise at midnight from his studies and, as he 
 walks to and fro under the stars, console himself 
 for his lost nationality by pondering the problem, 
 poignant in its sarcasm as in its pathos : Which is 
 the greater humiliation to a race, to be indebted 
 to another for its government or to be indebted to 
 another for its religion? Germany, on the other 
 hand, is year by year preparing to make this great 
 religious experiment. The development of German 
 thought, from Kant to Fichte, from Hegel and 
 Schopenhauer to Lotze, Hartmann and Nietzsche, 
 strives to no other term. 
 
 ''Thus in the spheres of religion and of thought 
 you have failed to impress your dominion upon the 
 Hindu imagination: the seed-fields of that failure 
 are rolling on to the harvest. The verses of one of 
 your own poets, pointless when applied to Rome 
 and Egypt, acquire a bitter meaning when applied 
 to England and India as but yesterday they were 
 applied by one of Ramakrishna's disciples educated 
 in England : 
 
 "'The East bowed low before the blast 
 In patient, deep disdain, 
 She let the legions thunder past 
 And plunged in thought again. ' 
 
 "Nevertheless, though thus failing in religion, 
 you might have succeeded as Consular Rome suc- 
 ceeded in Hellas. Failing to impress your domin- 
 ion on India by sovereignty of mind or by the 
 
ENGLAND'S FAILURE IN INDIA 29 
 
 daring of speculative thought, you might still have 
 impressed the imagination of the Hindu by your 
 valour and by your organized strength in war. 
 To the three hundred millions of Hindus you 
 might have presented yourselves as a great Kshat- 
 riya race, a nation of warriors. Instead of this you 
 attempt to hold India with almost fewer legions 
 than Rome required to govern the original de- 
 spicable race of Britannia. You invite hundreds of 
 young Hindus of ancient lineage to your universi- 
 ties and to your schools. With what feelings must 
 they read the tirades against a Nation in Arms, 
 the litanies in praise of peace, which argue the 
 slave and the coward at heart ! Instead of a nation 
 of Kshatriyas you appear as a nation of Vaisyas — 
 a nation of shopkeepers indeed ! You alone of the 
 nations of Europe in the twentieth century still 
 possess a mercenary army! Only at one period 
 of your history, Treitschke affirms, did you ever 
 possess a national army, and that was in the time 
 of Cromwell.^ When Englishmen ceased to be 
 soldiers they forfeited their right to govern India 
 in perpetuity. 
 
 "Thus in India you have failed conspicuously, 
 ignobly and completely, because as a government 
 and as a nation you have lost, if you ever possessed 
 them, the three qualities revered by the Hindu 
 race — creative genius in religion, the valour in 
 arms of a military caste, and the pride of birth of 
 
 ^ Treitschke's "Politik,'' vol. IL, p. 358. 
 
30 THE PROBLEM 
 
 the rajah. But chiefly you have failed because you 
 have ceased to be soldiers ; because you dread war ; 
 because you present to the whole world the spec- 
 tacle which the world has not seen since the fall of 
 the Byzantine Empire — a timorous, craven nation 
 trusting to its fleet. 
 
 "And as you have failed in India, so you will fail 
 in Egypt, which, next to India, is the most sacred 
 region on this earth. As yet you have succeeded 
 only in vulgarizing it. The Mamelukes spared the 
 majesty of the Pyramids. Napoleon, turning from 
 them, could make his great appeal, * Soldiers, forty 
 centuries look down upon your actions ! ' But you 
 crept into possession of Egypt, by the weakness of 
 France, like a fox creeping into a farm-steading.'* 
 
 A different group of critics direct the indictment 
 against various aspects of our civic and national 
 life, against our morals, the administration of our 
 laws, our universities, and even against that palla- 
 dium, that happy via media, the Anglican Church. 
 It is affirmed with regard to the national religion of 
 England that that religion which we are proud of 
 naming "Catholic" nevertheless is the most pro- 
 vincial of all the creeds born of the Reformation. 
 Luther, Calvin, even Zwingli, can claim adherents 
 in other countries than those in which the faith of 
 each was founded. But Anglicanism — where are the 
 proselytes from other nations who have adopted 
 that as their life-giving hope? And its annals 
 since its institution are as barren or as provincial 
 
CHURCH AND UNIVERSITY CRITICS 31 
 
 as its doctrine and its ritual. What single name of 
 European power in the eighteenth or nineteenth 
 centuries has it produced? And at the present 
 hour it has not a bishop whose name is known 
 beyond the boundaries of his own diocese, or a 
 single theologian who has any claim to the atten- 
 tion of mankind except such as is derived from his 
 study of the German masters in his own science. 
 And even in the sphere of theological criticism 
 where is the English Reuss or Renan, where is the 
 English Friedrich Strauss? 
 
 The criticism of our universities, rills from the 
 German Parnassus, is so old and still so well justi- 
 fied that it would be tedious to repeat it. A new 
 touch is contributed by Dr. Karl Botticher, who 
 tells us in effect: "You govern millions who read 
 their sacred books in the Sanscrit and Arabic 
 characters; but the fairest specimens of those 
 types are still cast in German fonts. A German 
 taught you the meaning of the religion of that 
 province which you regard as the brightest jewel 
 in the English crown ; and to German scholarship 
 you owe the initiatory impulse to study each of 
 the four great world-religions of your empire — Mo- 
 hammedanism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and 
 Brahminism. " Or again, it is pointed out that 
 Macaulay, our greatest national historian, makes 
 mistakes in philosophy which no German Fuchs 
 would commit.^ 
 
 ^ "Macaulay exhibits a lack of philosophic culture that abso- 
 
32 THE PROBLEM 
 
 Contained also in this indictment is the charge 
 against English law, arising out of the English 
 Press criticisms of the German trials of English 
 spies a short time ago. It is asserted that here too 
 England is taking the downward course. 
 
 The critics pass on to consider other points of our 
 life — our army, for instance, for which they have 
 nothing but contempt. "You boast that the 
 English flag is propped on the bones of the English 
 dead; but from Blenheim to La Belle Alliance^ 
 German valour was prodigal of German blood in 
 winning your victories. Gibraltar itself was cap- 
 tured for you by a foreign force led by a German 
 prince; the right wing at Blenheim was scattered 
 and the day lost when young Dessauer — ^not yet 
 the old Dessauer — ^wrested victory from disaster;^ 
 
 lutely amazes us Germans. He says things that with us no stu- 
 dent would dare to say. ... A comparison of Ranke with 
 Macaulay brings out the contrast between German profundity 
 and English superficiality." (Treitschke's "Politik," vol. II., 
 p. 359.) Emerson's opinion, expressed in his "English Traits," 
 is the same. 
 
 ^ " La Belle Alliance," "Schonbund," the designation for Napo- 
 leon's last battle consistently used by Prussian historians, e.g., 
 Hausser, Sybel, Droysen, Schlosser. 
 
 2 [Note. — This, of course, is an extreme instance of partial 
 statement by such critics. At Blenheim the right wing (under 
 Eugene) was never ** scattered,'^ though it was repulsed; it was 
 not Dessau but Marlborough who changed his plan, concentrated 
 on the French centre, and thus broke their line. At Gibraltar, the 
 share of the fleet under Rooke, who first bombarded the town and 
 then landed the capturing force, is ignored.] 
 
SOLDIER AND SUFFRAGETTE INDICTED 33 
 
 and yet once more, on the i8th of June, 1815, the 
 advance of Blucher and his corps of Prussians 
 saved your army from annihilation. And did not 
 Professor Delbriick inform us during the Boer War 
 that your soldiers on the march chained Boer 
 women together in order to form a screen to pro- 
 tect themselves from the bullets of outraged hus- 
 bands and fathers? And do we not know from 
 discussions in our Kriegsschule that your soldiers 
 have laid down their arms when every tenth man, 
 and sometimes every fifteenth man, was woimded; 
 whereas in 1870 our Germans stood unyielding 
 even when every third man was down? General 
 von Bernhardi's opinion of your officers of higher 
 grade is well known. " ^ 
 
 And finally, turning to English society, the in- 
 dictment centres upon that movement towards 
 Woman's Suffrage which has characterized English 
 life during the last two years. ''Does not the 
 Suffragette, loud-voiced, coarse-minded, stealing 
 about like a thief with a hammer up her sleeve, 
 represent English women to the civilized world?" 
 To this caricature they oppose the picture of the 
 German woman, her virtues, her dignity and her 
 simplicity. They cite the magnificent answer of 
 the Prussian mother in the War of Liberation of 
 1 813: **Who is the noblest woman?" ''She who 
 
 ^ Bernhardi's opinion of our commanders is written all over his 
 book, although he has the highest regard for the English private, 
 for the rank and file. 
 
34 THE PROBLEM 
 
 has given most sons to die for the Fatherland." 
 Or they quote Queen Luise: ''The children's 
 world, that is world enough for me. " Yet she was 
 capable of appreciating Goethe. German women, 
 too, they assert, have gone to war; but German 
 women make war, not against flower-beds or golf- 
 links, insensate pillar-boxes or shop windows, but 
 like soldiers against soldiers. They quote those 
 tragic and pathetic incidents which occurred during 
 the great Befreiungskrieg exactly a hundred years 
 ago ; and from that they go back four years earlier 
 to those incidents which marked the battlefields in 
 the heroic rising of the Prussian Schill in 1809, 
 when in more than one instance, as the helmets of 
 the dead were removed, a flood of golden hair 
 rolled down from under the helmet to the waist of 
 the fallen. That, they say, is how German women 
 go to war. 
 
 Now the accuracy or inaccuracy of the various 
 counts in this indictment is irrelevant here; what 
 concerns us is that, now on this point, now on that, 
 it is accepted by thousands of Germans at the 
 present day as a fair portraiture of England and 
 the English. All Germans do not subscribe to all 
 these counts, few Germans do not subscribe to 
 some. It is vain to call this an echo of the Boer 
 War; the longest echo does not last twelve years. 
 Besides, what is more evident to history than that 
 there was some deeper cause than Wilhelm II 's 
 telegram for that extraordinary outburst of hate? 
 
THE PLEA FOR DISARMAMENT 35 
 
 The significance of this indictment is its moral 
 scorn. And the inference drawn from it may be 
 stated thus : How is the persistence of a great un- 
 warHke Power sprawHng Fafnir-wise across the 
 planet to be tolerated by a nation of warriors? 
 Ought not the arrogated world-supremacy of such 
 a race to be challenged? He who strikes at Eng- 
 land does not necessarily sin against the light or 
 commit a crime against humanity. England is 
 failing because she ought to fail. She is already 
 straining to the utmost. This she betrays by her 
 pleadings with Germany to disarm. Why should 
 not Belgium or Paraguay, for that matter, propose 
 to Germany to limit her armaments? How did 
 England act towards Denmark in 1801 or again in 
 1807? There you have the epitome of the entire 
 history of England. But now that she feels her 
 strength leaving her, now that her day is over, she 
 talks to others of disarmament! It is the first 
 time in history that such propositions have been 
 made, and it is fitting enough that they should 
 come from this h^^pocrite power. England may 
 gradually sink from internal decay, as Venice 
 gradually sank after 1500, dying of senility, until at 
 a touch from Napoleon's sword she crumbled ; or, if 
 she has spirit enough, England may perish from a 
 bayonet-thrust to the heart. But perish she must. 
 And the judgment of the great national historian of 
 Germany is quoted — Heinrich von Treitschke, a 
 man whose position is almost as if he were the 
 
36 THE PROBLEM 
 
 poet-laureate in prose of Bismarckism and of the 
 Hohenzollern dynasty. In Treitschke's phrase, ''a 
 thing that is wholly a sham cannot in this universe 
 of ours endure for ever. It may endure for a day, 
 but its doom is certain ; there is no room for it in a 
 world governed by valour, by the Will to Power." 
 And it was of England that he spoke. 
 
 V 
 
 The prophecy of Niebuhr eighty years ago, the 
 fall of Britain which Stein in his dying years 
 augured, is thus for these critics nearer fulfilment. 
 The mode of the fulfilment is uncertain. 
 
 The question of questions to young Germans, 
 eager with historical analogies, exuberant with 
 life, is: Who is to be the inheritor of this mori- 
 bund, or quasi-moribund, empire? This Venice- 
 Carthage of the twentieth century — who is to 
 destroy her? 
 
 No one who has studied Russian political history, 
 Russian art and literature, the evolution of Russian 
 ideas, no one who has witnessed the pathetic 
 uncouth attempts of the Duma, can possibly see in 
 Russia a world-leader. That part France has 
 played, and cultured Germans join with Nietzsche 
 in their tribute to the past services of France to 
 humanity. She gave her name to the Crusaders; 
 in the sixteenth century she brought Italy to 
 Europe; in the eighteenth she was a legislator in 
 
WHO SHALL LEAD THE WORLD ? 37 
 
 thought. Napoleon in 1809 attempted to wrench 
 a planet from the hideous tentacles of this octopus, 
 this British dominion strangling a world. Napo- 
 leon failed to achieve this deliverance of the planet 
 from what Heine called the dullest, most insuffer- 
 able, commonplace and bourgeois of all empires. 
 Shall Germany succeed in that task of world- 
 liberation? 
 
 To the students of Sybel, who, awed and solemn, 
 saw in 1870 the manifest finger of God; to the stu- 
 dents of Giesebrecht, who saw in Germany the 
 nation of nations, God's chosen for the accomplish- 
 ment of His inscrutable will, the answer is obvious ; 
 and when from the writings of Giesebrecht they 
 turn to Treitschke, and from Treitschke to Droy- 
 sen and Hausser, the old crude idea of a day of 
 reckoning with England acquires a new signifi- 
 cance. Germany is watching and waiting. Year 
 by year silently she prepares. She recalls the 
 alternate elations and trembling counsels in Rome 
 before the march of Alaric in the fifth century; 
 and with warrior-laughter she measures the cer- 
 tainty of her triumph by the convulsive panic- 
 attacks of her ignoble foe! After all, on this earth 
 the one thing that is insufferable, whether in 
 politics or in religion, whether in private or in 
 national affairs, is that a sham should go on pre- 
 tending to be a reality, that weakness should 
 persist in grimacing as power, falsehood as truth, 
 injustice as justice. That is the hypocrisy of the 
 
38 THE PROBLEM 
 
 soul. Hateful to God and to the enemies of God 
 is such continuance — "A Dio spiacenti ed a' 
 nemici sui!" 
 
 And when from the present and the nearer past 
 Germans turn to the remoter past and to the dis- 
 tant periods of their history and inquire: "What 
 are our title-deeds to world-empire?" a series of 
 heroic and tragic forms meets their wondering 
 eyes. For Englishmen, indifferent to or careless 
 of their own history and blankly ignorant of Ger- 
 many's, it is difficult to realize the effect upon the 
 German mind of the discovery of the imperial eras 
 of her history — the recovery of Charlemagne as a 
 German hero, the exhumation from chronicle and 
 annals of the forms of the Ottonides, and, above 
 all, of the Hohenstaufen in the coloured and 
 entrancing pages of Giesebrecht. There is no 
 resisting the impressive grandeur of these figures, 
 and the young German does not exist who can look 
 back on that history without emotion and swelling 
 pride. ^ 
 
 The Prussian School of historians has written the 
 history of Germany as the exposition of a single 
 divine idea — the movement towards unity under 
 Prussia, and the creation, not of a new empire, but 
 
 ^ No one has felt more intimately than Wilhelm II. the glamour 
 of those eras. Personally, and in his own temper, he has re- 
 sponded to its literary expression — the heroic elan of Wolfram, 
 the naive charm of Walther, Gottfried's wayward imaginings, 
 the forest-romance of Iwein. Yet he is no mere " Cultur-Kdnig," 
 no Ludwig of Bavaria. 
 
"WORLD-DOMINION OR RUIN" 39 
 
 of a new phase of empire. To them avatar suc- 
 ceeds avatar. The Karhngs represent the triumph 
 over Rome. Charlemagne ends the work begun on 
 the obscure and bloody fields of Campi Raudii and 
 guided to a more glorious issue by Alaric and 
 Ataulf, by Genseric and Theodoric. The Saxons 
 submit to the Rome-idea, to Galilee; but with 
 the Hohenstaufen German genius in religion, in 
 politics, in law, in poetry, asserts itself. An 
 immense pause follows, ending in the obscurantist 
 Habsburgs; but through all the nation's life 
 advances. 
 
 And now, under the Hohenzollern, what is the 
 future? Bernhardi, at least, is explicit: "For us 
 there are two alternatives and no third — world - 
 dominion or ruin, Weltmacht oder Niedergang.'^ It 
 is the interpretation of Treitschke's maxim, 
 "Selbst ist der Mann." 
 
 VI 
 
 When, turning to England, I consider the apathy 
 or the stolid indifference of the nation — when, for 
 instance, I consider the deliberate and hostile 
 silence or loud calumnies which, for the past seven 
 years, have accompanied Lord Roberts's crusade; 
 and when, over against this apathy, I survey in 
 this month of February, 1913, the energy, the 
 single, devoted purposefulness throbbing every- 
 where throughout Germany, her forward-ranging 
 
40 THE PROBLEM 
 
 effort, her inner life, her army, her fleet, I seem to 
 hear again the thunder of the footsteps of a great 
 host. ... It is the war-bands of Alaric ! 
 
 And pondering the future, seeking in the past, 
 where alone it can be found, some taper-light to 
 illumine the future, there rises before me one of the 
 most solemn moments that I have ever personally 
 experienced in English history. It was in 1900, in 
 the early stages of the Boer War. But a few weeks 
 ago, and the Scythian's taunt to the Roman C^sar 
 seemed borne to us down the centuries, "I marvel 
 that you still speak of empire, you who can no 
 longer make war upon a village!" Now the crisis 
 was over. 
 
 On that afternoon we had before us in the Albert 
 Hall a great statesman, the late Marquis of Salis- 
 bury. What had been in his mind during the 
 fateful weeks? And as he rose and the immense 
 hush swept over the audience it was difficult not to 
 recall Milton's verses, born perhaps of his own 
 recollection of some chance visit to the House when 
 Strafford rose or Pym, or from later memories of 
 Cromwell himself : 
 
 **. . . . with grave 
 Aspect he rose, and in his rising seem'd 
 A pillar of state; deep on his front engraven 
 Deliberation sat and publick care; 
 And princely counsel in his face yet shone 
 Majestick, though in ruin; sage he stood 
 
LORD SALISBURY 41 
 
 With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear 
 
 The weight of mightiest monarchies ; his look 
 
 Drew audience and attention still as night 
 
 Or summer's noontide air, while thus he spake. " 
 
 In Lord Salisbury, at once in his personality and 
 in his genius, I saw then, as I see now, the greatest 
 statesman in English history since the eighteenth 
 century, the last great Englishman of the line of 
 Strafford, Somers, Bolingbroke, Carteret, Chat- 
 ham and Canning. Certainly in no politician in 
 English history have we the proofs of a profounder 
 insight. In this very matter of Germany, for 
 instance, he foresaw, point by point, her develop- 
 ment; and at the beginning of his career, in one 
 brilliant article after another in our quarterlies, 
 Lord Salisbury, then Lord Robert Cecil, marked 
 out the exact lines which that development of 
 Germany took — ^from the Kiel Canal right on to 
 those batteries and "Dreadnoughts" concentrated 
 there in the North Sea, which are already, whether 
 we regard them as such or not, the first conflict 
 between England and Germany.^ 
 
 And in delivering one of the last and, I think, one 
 of the greatest of his speeches. Lord Salisbury must 
 
 ^ And in that conflict England has suffered her first defeat, her 
 first moral defeat. She has had to withdraw her fleet from the 
 Mediterranean. That sea was once ours — an English lake. It is 
 no longer ours. Our power is concentrated, watching our dearest 
 friends, those Germans who have no intention whatever of coming 
 near England! 
 
42 THE PROBLEM 
 
 have felt the futility of his insight. He might, if 
 Greek tragedy had been as familiar to him as the 
 laws of metals, have cited the verses of Teiresias: 
 
 $£D <l>£u, <J>pov£Tv ax; Betvbv ev9a ^-f) tsXtq 
 
 XUY) <l>pOVOUVTt/ 
 
 The thought must have been in his mind. Yet he 
 was to the last a fighter, an Englishman who never 
 doubted his country's ultimate victory, temperate, 
 a master of the under- statement, a man whom, 
 upon the whole, it is a greater achievement for a 
 nation to have produced than to have produced 
 a Bismarck. ^ 
 
 And the words which Lord Salisbury spoke that 
 day? If ever a great warning was given to a 
 people it was contained in those words, in his ref- 
 erence to dying empires and dying nations, to the 
 passing of kingdoms, the vicissitudes of States and 
 
 ' "Alas, how dreadful to have wisdom where it profits not the 
 wise!" 
 
 '^ I do not find less vividness, more wordiness in his speeches 
 than in those of Bismarck. Eulogizers of an academic bias, 
 indeed, assert that Bismarck's speeches will endure whilst Ger- 
 many endures. He has enriched, they say, the German language 
 with innumerable phrases; but when challenged they are slow to 
 produce those phrases. They begin and nearly always end with 
 "blood and iron." I make no such claims for Lord Salisbury. 
 He was not an artist, nor was Bismarck; but he was superior to 
 the latter as a thinker. Had he been a German he would not 
 have incurred the just and savage contempt which Otto Weininger 
 and Nietzsche have poured on Bismarck. 
 
DEMOSTHENE'S TO ATHENS 43 
 
 the mutation in things; and, above all, in his appeal 
 to Englishmen to arm and prepare themselves for 
 war, for a war which might be on them at any hour, 
 and a war for their very existence as a nation and 
 as a race. And he quoted with deep meaning and 
 deep purpose — for as an orator Lord Salisbury 
 seldom strayed into the past of history without 
 meaning to the utmost every word he said — ^he 
 quoted the downfall of Carthage. ^ 
 
 As I walked from the meeting, the twilight fall- 
 ing across the Park, the words of another orator 
 came back to me — the exhortation addressed by 
 Demosthenes to Athens, words which, spoken in 
 Athens' darkest hour, bear a strange resemblance to 
 those spoken by Lord Salisbury in this, the last of 
 his great speeches. "Yet, O Athenians," said the 
 Greek, "yet is there time! And there is one 
 manner in which you can recover your greatness, 
 or, dying, fall worthy of your past at Marathon 
 and Salamis. Yet, O Athenians, you have it in 
 your power; and the manner of it is this. Cease to 
 
 ^ Underlying the discussions in this country as to Germany's 
 motives for war with England there is often the assumption that 
 it is not England that Germany desix'es, but England's colonies. 
 Yet has England the power to surrender the colonies? Or if she 
 surrendered them, Canada or New Zealand, for instance, would 
 they yield at England's bidding? And in attempting to enter 
 into possession of Canada, Germany would at once find herself at 
 war with the United States. But it is not our colonies that Ger- 
 many desires. It is a great central European State, with these 
 islands as its conquered provinces — that is the true meaning of 
 Lord Salisbury's last solemn warnings from the fate of Carthage. 
 
44 THE PROBLEM 
 
 hire your armies. Go yourselves, every man of 
 you, and stand in the ranks; and either a victory 
 beyond all victories in its glory awaits you, or, 
 falling, you shall fall greatly and worthy of your 
 past!" 
 
 The roles of Demosthenes in Athens and of Cato 
 or Tacitus in Rome are significant. These men are 
 phenomena in an onward-rushing stream. But 
 Athens listened to Demosthenes as she might have 
 listened to the protagonist in one of the tragedies. 
 Yet this was her own tragedy. Would England be 
 wiser than Athens? 
 
 Twelve years have passed. The voice which that 
 afternoon thrilled an immense audience is still. 
 Edward VII has succeeded, and, after a brief 
 dominion, has followed the Empress-Queen to the 
 vaults at Windsor. It was 1900; it is 19 13; and to 
 the words of the last great Englishman in politics 
 there have been added the message and solemn 
 warning of perhaps the greatest living leader of 
 men in the field of battle, the man who more than 
 any other merits the name "the Sidney of these 
 later times" — Lord Roberts. How much more 
 insistent at this hour, how much more imperious, 
 challenging to every Englishman who cares for 
 more than the day's transient interests, have 
 become the words of the Greek orator, which find 
 this strange echo, after more than two thousand 
 years, in the summons of these great Englishmen: 
 *' Rouse yourselves from your lethargy! Cease to 
 
LORD ROBERTS'S MESSAGE 45 
 
 hire your soldiers! Arm and stand in the ranks 
 yourselves — as Englishmen should! And thus, 
 dying you shall die greatly, or, victorious, yours 
 shall be such a victory as nothing in England's 
 past can exceed or rival. " 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 PEACE AND WAR 
 
 The theme of our last lecture was the confronta- 
 tion of two great nations, each endowed from the 
 past with the memories of ancient valour, of hero- 
 ism in art and poetry as in war and politics ; each, 
 again, possessing that attribute which I can only 
 describe as innate capacity or genius for empire. 
 Yet the one has been for two hundred years the 
 possessor of the richest as well as the most in- 
 teresting portions of this earth, whilst the other is 
 shut within its boundaries, the Baltic, the Danube, 
 and the Rhine. England is a nation schooled in 
 empire from the past, the power which once 
 belonged to the few gradually passing more and 
 more into the ranks of the English race itself, so 
 that you have for the first time in history at 
 once a nation and a democracy that is imperial. ' 
 
 ^ This is the unique character of Britain as an empire. Athens 
 was an example of this, but Athens was a civic empire, not a 
 national empire in the sense in which England is a nation. More- 
 over, whilst it was in form a republic and democratic, it was in 
 its essence aristocratic and oligarchic, the large majority of the 
 population having no share, direct or indirect, in government. 
 
 46 
 
ENGLAND AND GERMANY CONFRONTED 47 
 
 In contrast to this, Germany is a nation which is 
 undisciplined in empire, which has never yet 
 known its glory. The position of Wilhelm II is 
 that of an emperor without an empire. 
 
 And the question we had to consider, quite 
 abstractly, was : What, according to the philosophy 
 of history, or even according to the mere processes 
 of common sense, is likely to result from such a 
 confrontation? Above all, what is likely to result 
 when the first nation, though pursuing colossal 
 organic ideals, yet seems to have become almost 
 weary of the glory of empire, expressing frequently 
 the desire for arbitration, for the limitation of 
 armaments, a "naval holiday," peace at any 
 price ;^ when its war-spirit, its energy, its sense of 
 
 The nearest approach to Athens is not England, but the Venice of 
 the middle period, the Venice of the great Serrata del Consiglio, 
 where the whole mass of the inhabitants were excluded from 
 political power, unless those descended from or connected with 
 the governing authorities of the time. 
 
 ^ Within the last few days, for instance, at a mere suggestion 
 by Admiral Tirpitz as to the diminution of the German Navy, the 
 whole Liberal Press rushed forward like gudgeons to welcome 
 even the shadow of a pretence of peace. Yet what really underlay 
 this suggestion was the desire of the German government to have 
 the more power to put forward their unprecedented demand for 
 fifty-two millions to increase the German Army. But, indeed, to 
 no student of German history, above all to no student of Hohen- 
 zollern history, does this give the slightest surprise. Such 
 Machiavellism in politics has been the mark of Prussian history 
 from the moment that Prussia appeared as a first-rate Power in 
 Europe under the Great Elector, when it led to Prussia's first 
 great victory at FehrbelHn. What was the policy of Frederick I 
 
48 PEACE AND WAR 
 
 heroism are apparently diminishing, and the mere 
 craving for Hfe and its comforts seems to be con- 
 quering every other passion — as if to this nation 
 the aim of all life were the avoidance of suffering — 
 what, I say, is likely to result, if, confronting this, 
 you have a nation high in its courage, lofty in its 
 ambitions, containing within itself apparently 
 inexhaustible forces, moving on its own path, 
 which in the future may lead it to destinies to 
 which even the imagination of a Treitschke can 
 hardly assign a limit? 
 
 In to-day's lecture we have a somewhat different 
 problem to face, but one that is intimately and 
 organically connected with the subject of the last 
 lecture. It is the problem indicated by such 
 phrases as "universal peace," "the end of war," 
 "all our swords turned to reaping-hooks, all our 
 barracks turned to granaries," and the like, the 
 problem raised by those who would wish those 
 energies which now find their scope in battle to be 
 diverted to ends which have as their object that 
 great aim in life- — ^the avoidance of suffering and 
 
 and of Frederick the Great himself but just this? "He is a 
 fool," said Frederick the Great, "and that nation is a fool, who, 
 having the power to strike his enemy unawares, does not strike 
 and strike his deadliest." Even Frederick William III, empty 
 and vain as he was, a man whom Napoleon derided as "a tailor 
 amongst kings," used this same policy in 1813 against Napoleon 
 — and the Battle of the Nations was the result. And in the nine- 
 teenth century the same policy has guided the Emperor William I 
 and the present Kaiser. 
 
THE CRY FOR PACIFICISM 49 
 
 the multiplication of comforts; in a word, the 
 problem of Pacificism and the theories of the 
 Pacificists and their comparative influence on 
 England and on Germany. 
 
 The theory of Pacificism is a growing force in 
 English thought and English literature, and is, in 
 English politics, apparently becoming a principle 
 of a great and historical party — one of its ideals, at 
 least. We have in practical politics witnessed its 
 operation during the last decade in the noisy if 
 transient enthusiasm, not necessarily insincere, 
 with which the successive Conferences at The 
 Hague have been garlanded ; or again in the recep- 
 tion of President Taft's "Message"; or again in 
 the appeals to arbitration, and the various pro- 
 posals for the limitation of armaments, serious or 
 grotesque, to which I have referred. 
 
 In this effusive sentiment for peace, these spas- 
 modic efforts to stop what it names "the mad race 
 for armaments," has England, this Power which 
 possesses one-fifth of the globe and an army at 
 least as large as that of Switzerland, forgotten its 
 sense of humour? Do we imagine that the other \ 
 Powers of the Continent see England exactly as 
 England sees itself — England ! the successful burg- 
 lar who, an immense fortune amassed, has retired 
 from business, and having broken every law, 
 human and divine, violated every instinct of 
 honour and fidelity on every sea and on every 
 continent, desires now the protection of the police ! 
 4 
 
50 PEACE AND WAR 
 
 "If you are not a coward," says a character in 
 one of the Sagas, "stand still whilst I send you this 
 gift " — the hurling of a spear! Similarly Germany 
 retorts when England, under her hypocritical or 
 anxious dread, proposes to disarm — ''You are the 
 great robber-State; yet now in the twentieth 
 century, as if the war for the world were over 
 because you are glutted with booty, now it is you, 
 you who preach to us Germans universal peace, 
 arbitration, and the diminution of armaments! 
 But our position is that this war is not over." 
 And they exhibit England's overtures to Germany 
 as due to subtlety or cowardice. 
 
 That is the significance of Germany's reply to 
 the offer of the British government in 1907 to 
 reduce her programme from three '* Dreadnoughts" 
 to two. Her answer was to increase her estimates 
 and accelerate her programme. That is the sig- 
 nificance of her answer in 1908, when England laid 
 down only two ''Dreadnoughts" and Germany 
 retorted by laying down four. That, above all, is 
 the significance of Germany's action in 191 1, when, 
 amid all the froth and loathsome sentiment and 
 empty vapouring around President Taft's "Mes- 
 sage" — when it seemed as if humanity, in politics, 
 at least, had forgotten its own semblance — • 
 suddenly a man's voice, human at last, announced 
 itself in the courage and common-sense of Beth- 
 mann-Hollweg's utterance (March, 191 1), "The 
 vital strength of a nation is the only measure of 
 
GERMANY'S ANSWER 51 
 
 that nation's armaments." And that, in 1913, 
 is still the significance of Germany's answer to 
 the egregious proposal of **a naval holiday" : a war 
 levy of £52,000,000 to be expended on fortresses, 
 aircraft, and barracks; the peace strength of the 
 army to be raised from six hundred thousand to 
 between eight and nine hundred thousand men. 
 
 Germany will never sincerely cease arming. If 
 England builds on the dream of Germany acqui- 
 escent she is destined to a bloody and terrible 
 awakening. Bethmann-Hollweg, in 191 1, but 
 repeats the truth enunciated by Treitschke in 
 1890, that a nation's armed force is the expression 
 of a nation's will to power, of a nation's will to life, 
 and must advance with that life. We can under- 
 stand the elation of Bemhardi, his pride in his 
 country and its great past, his belief in its yet 
 greater future as the nation of nations, dowered 
 with the right to set itself the high task of guiding 
 the future of humanity. 
 
 A year ago, in speaking of the French Revolu- 
 tion, I defined the essence of that movement as 
 the strife from a high to an ever higher reality. 
 Amongst the Powers and States of the Continent 
 and of the world that seems Germany's part at the 
 present hour. 
 
 And here let me say with regard to Germany 
 that of all England's enemies she is by far the 
 greatest; and by "greatness" I mean not merely 
 magnitude, not her millions of soldiers, her millions 
 
52 PEACE AND WAR 
 
 of inhabitants, I mean grandeur of soul. She is the 
 greatest and most heroic enemy — if she is our 
 enemy — that England, in the thousand years of 
 her history, has ever confronted. In the sixteenth 
 century we made war upon Spain and the empire 
 of Spain. But Germany in the twentieth century 
 is a greater power, greater in conception, in thought, 
 in all that makes for human dignity, than was the 
 Spain of Charles V and Philip II. In the seven- 
 teenth century we fought against Holland; but 
 the Germany of Bismarck and the Kaiser is greater 
 than the Holland of De Witt. In the eighteenth 
 century we fought against France; and again, the 
 Germany of to-day is a higher, more august power 
 than France under Louis XIV. 
 
 II 
 
 What, then, is Pacificism? Dismissing from our 
 minds for a moment German criticism or German 
 interpretation of England's purposes, let us con- 
 sider the ideal itself and its exponents. 
 
 The. ideal in itself is so fair, this vision of a de- 
 sirable life, that we are silent even before the 
 eccentricities or fatuities of its advocates. Man, 
 in his war against the vast sorrow of existence and 
 necessary pain, declares: Now we shall at least 
 cease to torture each other; man shall no longer 
 add deliberately to the sufferings of man, more 
 tiger than the tiger. This earth then shall afford 
 
PACIFICISM 53 
 
 the picture which allured the imagination of Mil-\ 
 ton and of Shelley, nation side by side with nation, | 
 race beside race, arranged in variegated communi- 
 ties and States — monarchies, empires, democracies, 
 republics — sedulous in a many-coloured harmoni- 
 ous activity. The very memory of war and of 
 war-heroisms — Napoleon, Caesar, Alexander, Achil- 
 les — ^falls into the dim background of an ever 
 remoter past from which humanity has liberated 
 itself, dedicated, not to war, but to the emulous 
 rivalries of peace, to the creation of beauty, to the 
 perfecting of the mind, to the discovery of fresh 
 modes of access to human nobility and to human 
 joy — music, painting, sculpture, poetry, architec- 
 ture; dedicated to the concentration in peace and 
 leisure of man's faculties upon the extension of 
 knowledge, the conquest of the eras of the past , 
 and of the eras of the future as it bursts through I 
 the present and its veils like the sun through fogs, 
 the ever wider expansion of our scrutiny into the ' 
 interstellar spaces, thought and imagination fusing 
 themselves, above all, in some newer vision of the / 
 universe and of God which shall as far transcend 
 the old philosophies and the old religions as the 
 theories of modern astronomy transcend those of 
 Hipparchus or Tycho Brahe. 
 
 Before such an ideal we are disposed, I say, to be 
 tolerant even to the extravagances of Tolstoi, his 
 appeals to the Gospels, for instance — though a 
 dissertation upon Christ as a strategist might have 
 
54 PEACE AND WAR 
 
 been written by a medisevalist, if strategy had been 
 an art then — and to Hsten without smiling when 
 the great Spanish legist Alberdi declares that the 
 soldier is no higher than the executioner, though 
 one would have imagined that the difference be- 
 tween the hangman on the scaffold, pinioning his 
 victim before destroying him, and the warrior on 
 the battlefield, perilling his life, would have been 
 apparent even to a Spanish doctrinaire! 
 
 It is difficult to answer the contentions of Pa- 
 cificism just as it is difficult to answer all modern 
 ismSf because every ism has certain groups within 
 it, and every group offers its own interpretation. 
 To the group represented by Count Lyof Tolstoi, 
 for instance, war is condemnable because it is 
 contrary to the very spirit — as he understands 
 them — of the four Gospels and of religion itself. 
 Did not Christ come to the earth to proclaim 
 peace? Eighteen hundred years have rolled away 
 and there is nothing but war. To this there is the 
 retort that, though Christ does not disdain to use 
 a metaphor from the life of camps, yet He accom- 
 panies it by no anathema on war. And the peace 
 which Christ came to proclaim was not the peace 
 of the ending of battles; it was the peace within 
 the soul, the spirit at one with itself, Islam, in the 
 sense that Mohammed used it, a metaphysical 
 peace altogether apart from political peace. 
 
 Then, again, another group represents war as 
 wholly evil because it is contrary to Law, asserting 
 
THE SENTIMENTAL CRUSADE 55 
 
 that when two nations go to war it is as if two 
 Htigants in a Court of Law were to maintain 
 each his own cause by violence. This is the posi- 
 tion taken up by the followers of Alberdi. Yet 
 the litigant appeals to something higher than 
 himself, while no free State sees anything higher 
 than itself. 
 
 Again, there is a whole crowd, to whom I need 
 not refer individually, of lesser names, publicists, 
 journalists, novelists and mere cranks, to whom 
 this phantasm appears the one thing worthy to 
 concern men in any serious manner — all of them 
 having the peculiar characteristic that they 
 approach the plain man, the man in the street, 
 with a slightly truculent air: *'Now, why don't 
 you help us to bring about this good of ours?'* 
 And there is nothing for the plain man to answer 
 unless this: "The thing you are trying to bring 
 about does not exist — it is simply a nothing. If, as 
 Bismarck did at the Congress of Berlin, you at- 
 tempt to bring about peace between any two 
 individual nations, that, of course, is a matter 
 within the scope of common sense ; but this other — 
 this 'universal peace' — what is it?" And then 
 they can only reiterate their belief in the passing 
 away of war, when all our swords shall be turned to 
 reaping-hooks, our barracks into granaries, and, I 
 suppose, all our howitzers into fire-irons ! 
 
 But what can be said in answer to the pacificists' 
 minute descriptions of the horrors of war? To 
 
56 PEACE AND WAR 
 
 throw wide the field-hospitals and exhibit doctors 
 and dressers at work on the wounded; to point to 
 the dead and dying hurried into the trenches; to 
 assert, "This is war; this is reality," is as convinc- 
 ing and as reasonable as to point to a regiment on 
 parade with band playing and colours flying and to 
 say: ^^This is the reality." War will never be 
 abolished by such denunciation of isolated fea- 
 tures. For in war there is always a series of in- 
 tricate and, complex phenomena, extending from 
 the period of apparent peace to the inception of 
 the idea of conflict, on through the corresponding 
 changes in the mind and purposes of the govern- 
 ment and nation to the conflict itself, the battle- 
 field, the sequel, the terms. 
 
 There in its specious and glittering beauty the 
 ideal of Pacificism remains ; yet in the long march 
 of humanity across thousands of years or thou- 
 sands of centuries it remains still an ideal, lost in 
 inaccessible distances, as when first it gleamed 
 across the imagination. It has always been there. 
 We find its traces in the Iliad and in the Sagas, 
 in the verse of Pindar and in the profound and 
 reflective prose of Thucydides. Livy's imagina- 
 tion responded to it, even when with the brush of 
 a Veronese or of a Titian he painted the wars of 
 Rome. It informs some of the noblest passages 
 of the Annals of Tacitus. It appears as the 
 "Truce of God" in the Middle Age, and in the 
 orators of the Reformation pronounces a maledic- 
 
ASPECTS OF PACIFICISM 57 
 
 tion upon him who wages war unjustly. In the 
 seventeenth century it is proclaimed as an ideal in 
 the name of Religion, in the eighteenth in the 
 name of Himianity, and in the nineteenth in the 
 name of commerce, industrialism and the progress 
 of the working classes. 
 
 It is not, perhaps, until the eighteenth century 
 that this idea of universal peace displays its present 
 characteristics. At the period of the Marlborough 
 wars there appears in France a portentous folio 
 volume by the Abbe de St. Pierre, having for its 
 central thesis the evils of war in the abstract. The 
 position there taken up is not very different from 
 the position taken up by Tolstoi. War is stigma- 
 tized as being in itself hostile to religion, and is 
 denoimced as being contrary to the commands of 
 Christ. This book produced a great many works 
 of a similar kind, and many refutations. 
 
 In the course of the nineteenth century you find 
 this idea appearing here in England in a new phase, 
 above all in the "Manchester School." War is 
 now regarded and described not so much as hostile 
 to religion, not so much as hostile to the commands 
 of Christ, but as inimical to the interests of indus- 
 try. The peace of the world must be secured, 
 indeed; but it is to be secured not by religion but 
 by a great conspiracy — or co-operation, if you like 
 — of all the forces of industry throughout Europe. 
 That is the Manchester doctrine of universal 
 peace — ^highly characteristic, one would say, of the 
 
58 PEACE AND WAR 
 
 nineteenth century! Yet it had a distinct power 
 at once in France and in Germany. 
 
 The final form that this strange theory has 
 assumed is that which it now affects to wear in 
 the twentieth century, a form equally interesting. 
 Now war is declaimed against and universal peace 
 with all its beauties is proclaimed, not because war 
 is contrary to the laws of God, to the laws of 
 religion, but — because it is opposed to social well- 
 being, and, economically, is profitless alike to vic- 
 tor and to vanquished. It has ceased to pay, 
 and it has ceased, therefore, to add to the comfort 
 of nations ! 
 
 Yet despite this hubbub of talk down all the 
 centuries war has continued — absolutely as if not a 
 word had been said either on one side or the other. 
 Man's dreadful toll in blood has not yet all been 
 paid. The human race bears still this burden. 
 Declaimed against in the name of religion, in the 
 name of humanity, in the name of profit-and-loss, 
 war still goes on, and to this day it is there — there 
 in the Balkans, raging at this hour ! 
 
 Ill 
 
 Why, then, is universal peace still an ideal? Why 
 is it less like some hope of the future, gilding the 
 eastern horizon, than like some memory of a 
 Satumian age sunk far below the darkened hori- 
 zons of the past? 
 
UNIVERSAL PEACE 59 
 
 An enumeration of the evils that attend man's 
 life in time of peace is obviously no answer. It is 
 equally no answer to celebrate the opportunities to 
 good-fellowship and self-sacrifice which the battle- 
 field affords, and sometimes witnesses. Towards 
 other ideals man has progressed — in his war against 
 disease, for instance, and in his war against nature, 
 the forest, the sea, the vicissitudes of season and of 
 climate; towards this ideal alone he has made no 
 progress. And yet it is an ideal which, unlike per- 
 ennial youth or immunity from pain and disease, 
 appears to be within his power. 
 
 War has changed its forms. Tribal forays have 
 ceased, and the internecine hatred of clans; but the 
 tribes and clans have themselves been merged in 
 the higher unity of the nation or the race, and the 
 warfares of the clan and the tribe have seemed to 
 add all their complexity and ferocity to the wars 
 of nations. That peculiar form of heroic warfare 
 of the Sagas has disappeared; but the conditions 
 of life which made it possible or necessary no 
 longer exist. Wars between city and city, as those 
 between Genoa and Pisa, Athens and Sparta, have 
 also ceased ; but civic States have vanished. Again, 
 the wars of religion have ceased ; but religion is no 
 longer the dominant force in man's life. War re- 
 mains as the supreme act of the State, unchanged 
 in essence, though varying in mode. In Europe, 
 which really governs the planet, every advance in 
 politics or religion has been attended by war. 
 
6o PEACE AND WAR 
 
 Now if one turns for a moment from the ideal of 
 universal peace — whether one regards it as a mere 
 chimera or as coming within the sphere of practical 
 politics — to the ideal of war, its history is certainly- 
 illuminating. 
 
 To the great historians of Greece, to Thucydides, 
 for instance, the stern disciplinarian of humanity, 
 gcatoq BtoaaxaXoq, the most grave, the most tragic 
 and the most philosophic of all historians, war 
 represents a permanent factor in human life, and 
 not only a permanent factor, but a noble factor. 
 It is the school of heroism, the exercise-ground of 
 nations, disciplining them in the highest manhood 
 — in valour. And this attitude of the Greek his- 
 torian governs equally the later Greek writers, 
 such as Polybius, who come within the dominion 
 of Rome. For war is at the root of Roman history. 
 The Romans are the great inventors in the art of 
 war ; they are the first scientists in war ; and to the 
 Romans it was not a mortal man but a god that 
 invented the formation of the Roman legion. 
 
 This attitude of Rome persists down to the 
 Middle Age — though then, in the Middle Age, war 
 receives the added glamour of religion. To 
 Mohammed and to his Arabs in the East war is not 
 only in itself a heroism, it is the divine act. And 
 in the West, similarly, in the same period, you find 
 the Roman Papacy adopting as the very central 
 thought of its foreign policy a great religious war — 
 the war of the Crusades. And if at that time you 
 
JUST AND UNJUST WARS 6l 
 
 do find arising in Europe the notion of the ''Truce 
 of God," this Truce of God becomes simply the 
 institution of a temporary peace between the 
 feudal chiefs and barons; it is no repudiation of 
 war in itself. 
 
 The same point of view is maintained right on 
 to the Renaissance and Reformation period. To 
 such a thinker and writer as Machiavelli, perhaps 
 the most profound mind that Italy ever produced, 
 far wider in its range of knowledge and speculation 
 than Dante's, war is the school of virtH, of valour, 
 heroism, excellence of any kind. With the Refor- 
 mation, on the other hand, a more psychological 
 investigation of war sets in. By the very spirit 
 of the Reformation the Divine was declared to be 
 here upon the earth, within man's reach and life, 
 and in all human actions — man's life on earth 
 being now not simply regarded as evil. War 
 therefore had to receive a closer examination and 
 an attempt had to be made to harmonize it with 
 what seemed to be the Divine. It is then that the 
 distinction arises between just and unjust wars. 
 A great cause, a good cause, it was said, justifies 
 war in the abstract; but he who wages "an unjust 
 war," in the phrase of Grotius, endures all the 
 responsibility for all the vile actions, all the suffer- 
 ing, appertaining to that war. 
 
 Frederick the Great, he who above all men exem- 
 plified heroism in war in the creation of that 
 War-State of Prussia which has gradually grown 
 
s 
 
 62 PEACE AND WAR 
 
 into the German Empire of the present hour, 
 writes in extreme age to Voltaire a letter which may 
 be taken as the summing-up of this tedious debate : 
 "I am old, cheerful, gouty, good-humoured. Now 
 that Poland has been settled by a little ink and a 
 pen, the 'Encyclopedic* cannot declaim against 
 mercenary brigands. For the future I cannot 
 vouch. Running over the pages of history, I see 
 that ten years never pass without a war. This 
 intermittent fever may have moments of respite, 
 but cease, never!'* This is the last word of the 
 * eighteenth century upon the dream of universal 
 peace, a word spoken by one of the greatest kings 
 of any age. 
 
 Here, then, we are brought up sharply against 
 the question: "Is man's failure to realize the ideal 
 of universal peace an arraignment of his capacity 
 or his sincerity? Has he the power to realize it or 
 is it the will that is lacking?" Without attempt- 
 ing further analysis and discussion, I am obliged 
 to answer that a survey of world-history — India, 
 Babylon, Persia, China, Hellas, Rome, the Middle 
 Age and Modern Europe — enforces the conclusion 
 that hitherto man has lacked not only the power 
 but the will to end war and to establish peace 
 throughout the continents of the habitable globe. 
 
 IV 
 
 Now it is a question stuely worth considering: 
 Why is it and for what reward that man still 
 
GLORY 63 
 
 clings to war? Is there anything in war that is 
 not wholly evil? Or must we be accused of per- 
 petual self-contradiction and blindness to our own 
 interests, all down the long six thousand years of 
 history? Or, on the other hand, is there in war 
 something which has escaped the examination of 
 Pacificism, and on what ground can one maintain 
 that this is so? 
 
 First of all, let me remind you that in human 
 life as a whole there are always elements and 
 forces, there are always motives and ideals, which 
 defy the analysis of reason — mysterious and dark 
 forces. Man shall not live by bread alone! And 
 in war this element constantly tends to assert 
 itself. It assumes forms that sometimes are 
 dazzling in their beauty; sometimes are wrapt in 
 a kind of transcendental wonder; sometimes, in 
 appearance at least, are simply utilitarian, or 
 chimerical, or fantastic. But all alike have this 
 quality of defying reason, of eluding the grasp 
 of the mind when exercised in formal judgment 
 merely. It is easy, for example, to demonstrate 
 that the glory of battle is an illusion; but by the 
 same argument you can demonstrate that all 
 glory and life itself is an illusion and a mockery. 
 Nevertheless men still live and go on pursuing that 
 illusion and that mockery. 
 
 As an illustration of what I mean by that which 
 stands above reason, let me speak to you for a 
 moment of that incident in the Antarctic zone 
 
64 PEACE AND WAR 
 
 which but a few weeks ago was absorbing the 
 imagination of every man and woman in these 
 islands. Let me speak to you of Captain Scott 
 and his heroic band, and let us consider how far 
 this element that transcends reason entered into 
 that particular heroism. 
 
 Image to yourselves that vast, that shapeless 
 desolation that reigns there for ever around the 
 austral pole, league on frost-bound league. Death's 
 appanage, untainted by any life eternally, not a 
 motion except the wild rage of the tempest or the 
 silent fall of ice-flakes through the windless air — a 
 desolation peopled by such phantoms as daunted 
 even the imagination of Camoens, the poet of 
 Vasco da Gama, the first great adventurer into 
 those silent seas. There, during the past year, 
 month by month the Polar sun forlorn has gleamed 
 through the mists, month by month through the 
 long night the Southern Cross has hung her 
 glittering fires on the steep blackness of the Antarc- 
 tic sky, looking down upon some little heaps of 
 English dust. Why have they come hither — these 
 Englishmen? What is the madness that has 
 drawn them from their secure homes in Devon- 
 shire or Suffolk, Ireland or the Welsh border, to 
 die thus agonizing here? That is the question 
 which, by not too daring a metaphor, the Southern 
 Cross might ask as through that long night she 
 looks down upon the English dead extended there 
 in frozen rigidity unmoving. To what possible 
 
THE DEATH OF HEROES 65 
 
 end have they come there? Assuredly for no mere 
 utilitarian end. The lure that has led them to 
 their glory and their rest is Reason indeed, the 
 increase of Knowledge, but something higher also. 
 Mere love of formal Knowledge — questions as to 
 the precise position of the South Pole, or whether 
 the fossils of an extinct race of animals which once 
 wandered there are preserved in the rocks and 
 stones — would never have inspired that drama. 
 
 For put before yourselves, incident by incident, 
 the later stages of that heroism — first the careful 
 survey on the Pole itself, hour by priceless hour 
 a hostage to death, then the terrible return with 
 the sick comrade, his death, and then that strange 
 heroism on the part of Captain Gates. As a his- 
 torian or at least a student of history, let me dwell 
 for a moment on the distinction of this valour. In 
 the Icelandic Sagas of the Middle Age, which re- 
 flect in a very remarkable manner the English char- 
 acter of that time although they were not written 
 by Englishmen, you find a certain kind of courage 
 frequently delineated — the courage shown, say, 
 in the great fight to avenge the death of Kjartan, 
 where one man after another, when they have 
 surrounded the house where the enemy is en- 
 trenched, volunteers to be the first to attack the 
 house and meet death. But in the death of 
 Captain Gates a valour of quite a different kind 
 displays itself. In that courage you have some- 
 thing spiritual, mysterious, added to this other 
 
66 PEACE AND WAR 
 
 courage of the Sagas — something which leads that 
 EngHsh gentleman to set forth solitary into the 
 terror-haunted darkness, seeking no visible enemy, 
 seeking only the universal enemy, to him a friend — 
 death, death; stumbling blindly, yet onwards and 
 still onwards into the night, into Annihilation, 
 fronting it. . . . 
 
 And then pass to the last stage in the drama — to 
 that other death. There in the tent beside his 
 dead the leader sits, still alive; there he sits, un- 
 vanquished and unappalled, his head propped 
 against the tent-pole to ease his fatigue in the last 
 slow dreadful vigil, whilst down over his magnifi- 
 cently English features a night deeper than the 
 Polar night descends. And what are the thoughts 
 which then flicker in front of him? We know 
 them; we have them written in his own hand in 
 that priceless record — priceless because authentic. 
 ''The greatness of England — my nation!" It is 
 the greatness of England which uplifts him as 
 death steals over his features like a marble mask. 
 
 Here, surely, we have a kind of heroism which it 
 would daunt the courage of any pacificist, of any 
 doctrinaire, to explain by the profit and loss theory 
 or to analyze by the ordinary processes of reason 
 at all. 
 
 Now I suggest to you that one explanation of 
 this extraordinary paradox in human history — the 
 persistence of war in spite of what seems its un- 
 reason — is that there is something in war, after 
 
NATIONAL WARS IN ENGLAND 67 
 
 all, that is analogous to this heroism there in the 
 Antarctic zone, something that transcends reason ; 
 that in war and the right of war man has a pos- 
 session which he values above religion, above 
 industry and above social comforts; that in war 
 "man values the power which it affords to life of 
 rising above life, the power which the spirit of 
 man possesses to pursue the Ideal. In all life at 
 its height, in thought, art, and action, there is a 
 tendency to become transcendental; and if we 
 examine the wars of England or of Germany in 
 the past we find governing these wars throughout 
 this higher power of heroism, or of something, at 
 least, which transcends reason. 
 
 Until about five hundred years ago England can 
 hardly be said to have fought as a nation. Her 
 wars till then represent rather the heroism of 
 dynasties and of individual groups of men than the 
 heroism of the nation as such. But towards the 
 middle of the fourteenth century there began a 
 series of really national wars in England — the wars 
 against France, with their great battles of Crecy 
 and Agincourt, and the great disaster, the hour 
 when with Talbot at Castillon an empire sank. 
 Then there is the war against Spain in the six- 
 teenth century, and in the seventeenth the wars 
 against Holland and the France of Louis XIV, 
 which continue into the eighteenth century and 
 find their natural termination only in the wars 
 against Napoleon. In the nineteenth century 
 
68 PEACE AND WAR 
 
 there is a long series of wars in all parts of the world 
 — in the Crimea, in India and Afghanistan, in 
 China, in New Zealand, in Egypt, in Western and in 
 Southern Africa; so that it might be said without 
 exaggeration that through all these years scarcely 
 a sun set which did not look upon some English- 
 man's face dead in battle — dead for England! 
 
 Now for what have these wars been fought? 
 Can one detect underneath them any governing 
 idea, controlling them from first to last? I answer 
 at once : There is such an idea, and that idea is 
 the idea of Empire. All England's wars for the 
 past five hundred years have been fought for 
 empire. There is first of all a war for an empire in 
 France — a wholly unrealizable idea, a war bound 
 to end in failure in the very nature of things, and 
 yet a war to which the English nation gave itself 
 with a splendour of courage, a lavishness at once 
 of blood and treasure, that still fills the mind with 
 admiration and lifts it beyond those utilitarian 
 speculations to which I have referred. 
 
 That war ends in disaster; and just at the 
 moment when that disaster is most complete, 
 when it seems as if England were doomed to fall 
 to a secondary or even a tertiary place in world- 
 history, suddenly there occurs that event which 
 it is hard not to ascribe to some deeper cause than 
 chance, to some profounder purpose than the 
 hazard in things. It is the discovery of the means 
 to a greater empire than the empire in France, to 
 
THE IDEA OF EMPIRE 69 
 
 an empire at once in the sunrise and in the sirnset. 
 It is America: it is India. The effect of this dis- 
 covery is Hke the awakening of a sleeper. A new 
 hope for EngHshmen arises, and now the English 
 imagination is fired and filled with this idea, so 
 that throughout the whole of EngHsh Hfe, in 
 every phase and grade of it, there is that exaltation, 
 that spiritual exultancy which finds its supreme 
 expression in the Elizabethan drama, in the great 
 dramatists of that time, in Marlowe and Shake- 
 speare and Ford, in Webster, in Beaumont and 
 Fletcher, in that outburst of thought and of art 
 which has no parallel in world-history — not in 
 Greece itself, unless possibly for a moment in the 
 age of Pericles.^ 
 
 This war for empire again finds expression in 
 the conflict with Spain, in the wars against Holland 
 and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth 
 centuries. And what was the stake for which 
 England fought in all her battles against Bona- 
 parte ? The stake was world-empire ; and Napoleon 
 knew it well. France's opportunity was now, or 
 her world-empire was lost for ever. Bonaparte 
 fought for that, and fought for it titanically and 
 superbly; and dying there in Sainte-Helene there 
 died with him a world-hope. 
 
 ' Even there it is less rich and varied in poetry; although, on 
 the other hand, the glory of the Parthenon, of sculpture, belongs 
 to Greece alone. That is the inalienable and for ever precious 
 gift of Hellas. 
 
70 PEACE AND WAR 
 
 Here then we have this transcendental force 
 governing the wars of England. And if we turn 
 from England to Germany we find the same ele- 
 ment which transcends reason governing the wars 
 of Germany. One emperor after another is led 
 south across the Alps in the attempt to make 
 Italy a part of Germany; to govern Italy, and 
 therefore the Papacy, from the Rhine; to make a 
 reality of that which was called the "Holy Roman 
 Empire" — an attempt doomed to disaster, just 
 as England was doomed to disaster on the fields 
 of France, a perfectly hopeless dream! Yet what 
 heroism, what courage, what names! It is to 
 those names and to that heroic past that Germans 
 turn for inspiration as year by year this newer 
 hope of empire arising within the German mind 
 deepens. 
 
 This dream of empire continues in her later wars. 
 
 [Note. — This section was left unfinished, A survey 
 of the wars of Germany in the light of this idea 
 is evidently the line on which it would have been 
 continued, hut unfortunately the lecturer left 
 no notes which could be used to finish the 
 section,] 
 
 V 
 
 Now considering the wars of England and of 
 Germany in this light, considering also the respec- 
 tive positions of these two nations at the present 
 
EFFECTS OF PACIFICISM 71 
 
 day, what is likely to be the comparative effect on 
 England and Germany of Pacificism with its de- 
 nial of the part played by danger and by suffering 
 in all heroic life? 
 
 Upon a young and virile nation, a rising military 
 State, daily growing in power, Pacificism can 
 never exert much infiuence for evil; there is no 
 possibility of such a nation being seriously turned 
 from heroism. But to an old nation in which 
 certain forces of decay seem, at least, already to 
 be manifesting themselves, might not such a 
 theory, if too ardently adopted, be fraught with 
 very terrible danger, with very real and disastrous 
 consequences? 
 
 In regard to Germany we are confronted by 
 certain circumstances that indisputably merit our 
 consideration here in England. There is, for 
 instance, the annual appearance in Germany of 
 very nearly seven hundred books deaHng with 
 war as a science. This points, at once, to an 
 extreme preoccupation in that nation with the 
 idea of war. I doubt whether twenty books a 
 year on the art of war appear in this country, 
 and whether their circulation, when they do ap- 
 pear, is much more than twenty ! 
 
 There is, again, the German way of regarding 
 war. What is the attitude of mind towards war 
 of Treitschke, for example, a man whose spirit 
 still controls German youth, German patriotism, 
 a man who has a power in Germany, as a thinker 
 
72 PEACE AND WAR 
 
 and as a writer, that you might compare to the 
 power exercised by Carlyle and by Macaulay put 
 together in this country? To him the army is 
 simply the natural expression of the vital forces 
 of the nation ; and just as those vital forces of the 
 nation increase so shall the German army and 
 the German navy increase. A nation's military 
 efficiency is the exact coefficient of a nation's 
 ideaHsm. That is Treitschke's solution of the 
 matter. His answer to all our talk about the 
 limitation of armaments is: Germany shall in- 
 crease to the utmost of her power, irrespective of 
 any proposals made to her by England or by 
 Russia, or by any other State upon this earth. 
 And I confess it is a magnificent and a manly 
 answer, an answer worthy of a man whose spirit 
 of sincerity, of regard for the reality of things, is 
 as great as Carlyle's. 
 
 The teaching of Treitschke's disciple, General 
 von Bernhardi, is the same. War to him is a duty. 
 Nothing is more terrible than the government of 
 the strong by the weak, and war is the power by 
 which the strong assert their dominion over the 
 weak. War sets the balance right. And the 
 younger poets of Germany breathe the same 
 spirit — Liliencron, for instance, who represents 
 most fitly that aspect of modern German litera- 
 ture. I have not time at this late hour to speak 
 of him so fully as I had hoped ; but that spirit of 
 war and glory which informs his battle-sketches 
 
PEACE THROUGH VICTORY 73 
 
 of the war of 1870 — I can sum it up for you. It 
 is in the verses of Goethe's Euphorion: 
 
 "Traumt ihr den Friedenstag? 
 Traume, wer traumen mag! 
 Krieg ist das Losungswort ! 
 Sieg! und so klingt es fort. "^ 
 
 That is the spirit in which war is regarded in 
 contemporary Germany. And I am not the least 
 astonished that when we send over from England 
 an itinerant preacher of universal peace to explain 
 to Germany, "For the love of God, don't make 
 war upon England; for it won't pay you" — I am 
 not the least astonished that in a mass meeting of 
 two thousand students at the university of Gottin- 
 gen this itinerant preacher and all his works were 
 set aside. How can we wonder at it? 
 
 England and Germany — on which is Pacificism 
 likelier to exercise a deleterious and a dangerous 
 effect? From to-day's survey of eternal abstract 
 principles, as from last week's survey of ephemeral 
 yet not insignificant criticism of England and her 
 empire, it becomes apparent that Germany is not 
 England's only enemy, perhaps not even her chief. 
 
 And yet, and yet — from those frozen regions of 
 the South there seems to come, like a trumpet-call, 
 
 ^ "Dream ye of peaceful sway? 
 Dream on, who dream it may. 
 War still is empire's word ! 
 Peace? By the victor's sword!" 
 
74 PEACE AND WAR 
 
 the message: The greatness of England still, the 
 greatness of England still! — England, for which 
 men can die as these men died, with a valour that 
 is higher than the valour of the past — a message 
 reinforcing again those words of the Athenian 
 which at this crisis of our fate I would to God rang 
 in every Englishman's ears and were graven on 
 every Englishman's heart: "Yet is there time, 
 O Athenians, yet is there time! Cease to hire 
 your armies ; cease to fill your ranks with the off- 
 scourings of a planet. Go yourselves and stand in 
 the ranks; and then, dying, you shall die greatly 
 and with a glory that shall surpass the glories of 
 the past, or, victorious, you shall gain a victory 
 that shall exceed all your victories in the past!" 
 
LECTURE III 
 
 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 
 
 Towards the end of last September I was stay- 
 ing in an hotel at a watering-place in the Midlands 
 when, on a Tuesday evening, there came the news 
 of the death of the Germ^an ambassador, Count 
 Bieberstein, here in London. The incident made 
 on me an unsual impression, for it seemed but 
 yesterday that he had arrived amongst us, over- 
 flowing with energy, animated, versatile, a mind 
 full of the future. His coming had instantly 
 greatened all our political life; for, in the defect 
 of even second-rate statesmen amongst ourselves, 
 the presence of a man who, if he did not actually 
 attain the first rank, certainly suggested the first 
 rank, had given a kind of dignity and meaning to 
 political life such as it had hardly known since the 
 death of Lord Salisbury. Now, as by a stroke 
 from the gods, that influence was withdrawn. The 
 sense of magnitude was gone, and the busy medioc- 
 rity, the hustler, and the charlatan, corrupting and 
 corrupt, again moved about in unrelieved oppres- 
 siveness. Those grave features with their Puritan 
 
 75 
 
76 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 
 
 severity of line we should see no more ; his plans, 
 his designs, were left an enigma. He had died 
 before the great distaste and the great weariness 
 had come upon him. To Bismarck and to Stein, 
 as to Frederick the Great, life had long been 
 infinitely contemptible, the purpose and the end 
 of existence a hieroglyph written in mud. But 
 Bieberstein had died under the everlasting illu- 
 sion, believing that he was doing something, 
 reaHzing some end, and that therefore some 
 end could be realized. 
 
 And in the lounge after dinner, amid the gossip 
 of the day, there came little splutters of intelligent 
 or unintelligent comment on the event; and as I 
 sat listening to these epitaphs a lady turned to 
 me, and casting down her face and then casting 
 up her eyes with a perfect expression of innate and 
 indescribable hypocrisy, observed: ''You do not 
 say anything. Ah well, the news is, of course, sad, 
 but we cannot perhaps altogether grieve that he 
 was taken. He was dreadfully against England, 
 was he not?" **Ah, madam," I answered, "the 
 death of a great man is a loss to humanity, what- 
 ever be his antagonisms or his sympathies; and, 
 after all, next to a true friend the possession of a 
 great and magnanimous enemy is perhaps the 
 most precious gift the gods can send us." She 
 wrinkled her brows; for she imagined, I suppose, 
 that by "the gods" I meant the Anglican bishops, 
 and was perplexed. 
 
TREITSCHKE 77 
 
 An enemy of England? I am not certain that 
 this is a just estimate of Count Bieberstein, but it 
 is assuredly a fair description of the man concern- 
 ing whom I have to speak to you this afternoon, 
 Heinrich von Treitschke. 
 
 Almost the last time we see Treitschke, those 
 noble features of his lit up, as they always were 
 instantly lit up by any enthusiasm, whether of 
 love or hate — almost the last time we really see 
 him is on an evening in 1895, when, returned from 
 a visit to England, he poured out to a company of 
 friends all the vitriol of his scorn, antipathy and 
 hate for England and for the English, enduring no 
 word of comment or contradiction, until someone 
 quoted to him Heine's malicious ''Englische Frag- 
 ment e," in which Heine discusses the question how 
 it is that so ignoble a nation as England can 
 possibly have produced a Shakespeare. And so 
 the meeting ended in agreement and laughter. 
 But all who listened to Treitschke that night 
 seemed to hear in his words, as they had heard in 
 his lectures again and again, the first dark roll that 
 announces the coming dreadful storm, the coming 
 war — the war that he regarded as simply inevitable 
 — between these two empires, both the descendants 
 of the war-god Odin, and yet, because of that, 
 doomed to this great conflict. 
 
 Within six months Treitschke was dead. 
 
78 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 
 
 II 
 
 How can one best present Treitschke to an Eng- 
 lish audience? How can one explain to an English 
 audience something of Treitschke 's position and 
 the place he fills in German life right on from 1858 
 until his death, and to the present hour? The 
 seventeen volumes of his collected writings on 
 history, on literature and on the science of politics, 
 his speeches on present-day questions and his 
 political pamphlets, have not been translated and 
 are therefore a sealed book to the majority of 
 EngHsh readers. 
 
 Yet at once in his own personality and as a 
 governing force in German thought, Heinrich von 
 Treitschke ought to be deeply interesting to us; 
 for more than any other single character in German 
 political life he is responsible for the anti-English 
 sentiment which blazed out during the Boer War, 
 which still reigns in German society and in the 
 German Press, which in the Reichstag reveals itself 
 in the frigid or ironic applause with which any 
 references to "our amicable relations with Eng- 
 land" are greeted. The foundations of that 
 sentiment, of course, lie deeper than the creative 
 power of an individual intellect or will. They are, 
 as we have seen, beyond the control of any passing 
 generation, rooting themselves in the dark forces 
 which determine the destinies of peoples and of 
 the universe itself. But Treitschke, beyond any 
 
ENGLAND'S SEA-SUPREMACY 79 
 
 other German, stands forth as the interpreter of 
 these forces. His interpretations have sunk deep 
 into the German mind; his fiery challenges and 
 impassioned rhetoric have coloured German 
 thought. Though his greatest book deals only 
 with the record of thirty- two years, it is spoken of 
 sans phrase as "the History of Germany,"^ and 
 "our great national historian" has become a 
 familiar periphrasis in newspapers and on plat- 
 forms for Treitschke's name. The real and 
 abstract principles of German history seen and 
 reinterpreted through Treitschke's medium — that 
 for many men in Germany has become their faith. 
 These are arguments of a unique and immense 
 influence. And what are the feelings towards 
 England which this great historian and orator 
 expresses? He incessantly points his nation on- 
 wards to the war with England, to the destruction 
 of England's supremacy at sea as the means by 
 which Germany is to burst into that path of glory 
 and of world-dominion towards which, through all 
 the centuries of her history, she has deliberately 
 moved. The Ottonides in the tenth century 
 sketched the plan; it has been reserved for the 
 Hohenzollern in the twentieth to fill in the details. 
 
 ^ The subject of Treitschke's "Deutsche Geschichte" is the 
 transformation of the German Confederation into the Empire; 
 but he had only reached the year 1848 when, at the age of 62, 
 he died. His " History " may be regarded as the analogue of 
 Pertz's "Life of Stein." 
 
8o TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 
 
 Discussing in a former lecture the question 
 whether the persistence of war accused humanity 
 of self-contradiction or some secular hypocrisy^ 
 I suggested that in the laws governing States and 
 individuals the highest functions transcend utility 
 and transcend even reason itself ; that in the present 
 stage of the world's history to end war is not only 
 beyond man's power but contrary to man's will, 
 since in war there is some secret possession or 
 lingering human glory to which man clings with an 
 unchangeable persistence, some source of inspira- 
 tion which he is afraid to lose, uplifting life beyond 
 life itself, some sense of a redeeming task which, 
 like his efforts to unriddle the universe, for ever 
 baffled yet for ever renewed, gives a meaning to 
 this else meaningless scheme of things. 
 
 A Greek orator has recorded an incident in 
 the life of the Emperor Julian, when, confronting 
 certain Teutonic tribes along the Rhine, he remon- 
 strated with them on their restless, predatory and 
 warlike habits, and one of their ambassadors, 
 answering the charge, summed up his defence with 
 the assertion: "But in war itself we see life's 
 greatest felicity." And five centuries of almost 
 uninterrupted war forged the unity of England. 
 But no English historian or thinker has spoken of 
 war quite as Treitschke has spoken of it. I do not 
 recollect a single passage in his writings in which 
 the conventional regrets are expressed, or where 
 conventional phrases such as "the scourge of 
 
WAR A NECESSITY 8i 
 
 mankind," "the barrier to human progress," 
 occur as descriptions of war. From an early period 
 in his literary career, on the other hand, phrases 
 of a quite different order abound in his writings, 
 phrases in which war appears, if not as "the su- 
 preme felicity of mankind," at least as a great 
 factor in the onward strife towards perfection; 
 whilst any attempt at its abolition is characterized 
 as unwise and immoral. 
 
 When General von Bemhardi, in a pamphlet 
 published in February last, ("Unsere Zukunft: 
 ein Mahnwort an das deutsche Volk"), puts before 
 his countrymen the alternatives of world-dominion 
 or ruin, when he speaks of war as a biological 
 necessity and as an extension of policy, and the 
 manliest extension, he is expressing, perhaps not 
 in the happiest literary manner, Treitschke's ideas. 
 The poet Liliencron, Treitschke's contemporary, 
 has expressed them much more happily, much more 
 fervently ; and Liliencron was a poet with a sword 
 by his side. He fought at Koniggratz in 1866, at 
 the age of thirty-two, and at Worth and Mars-la- 
 Tour in 1870. And what is a governing thought of 
 Liliencron's battle-sketches, of "Der Richtungs- 
 pimct," for instance, or of "Eine Sommerschlacht," 
 except the thought of Faust : 
 
 "O selig der, dem er im Siegesglanze 
 Die blut'gen Lorbeern um die Schlafe windet."^ 
 
 * "0 happy he for whom in victory's splendour 
 
 Death wreathes the blood-stained laurel round his brow." 
 6 
 
82 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 
 
 There is no greater contrast in literature than 
 between the emotion which pervades Tolstoi's 
 "War and Peace," the scene, say, on the redan in the 
 description of Borodino, and the emotion which 
 pervades Liliencron's descriptions of Worth and 
 Mars-la-Tour. And, again I must remind you, 
 Liliencron not less than Tolstoi knew what he 
 was talking about. 
 
 Ill 
 
 In his own country Treitschke is sometimes de- 
 scribed as the Coryphaeus of the Prussian School, 
 that group of historians of whom Droysen, Hausser 
 and Sybel, Pertz, the biographer of Stein, and 
 Delbriick, the biographer of Gneisenau, are per- 
 haps the best-known names in this country. The 
 greatness of Prussia and the fate-appointed world- 
 task or world-mission of Germany under the 
 sacred dynasty of the Hohenzollem is the inspira- 
 tion of all these men. 
 
 Treitschke's *' History" is characterized by punc- 
 tilious research and by reliance on original docu- 
 ments and original documents only. There are 
 brilliant chapters on literature and the inter- 
 connexion of literature and history. Here he sug- 
 gests Taine, his contemporary; and, had he lived 
 another ten years, his book might have been styled 
 " The Foundations of Contemporary Germany." 
 English critics have sometimes compared him with 
 
TREITSCHKE AND MACAULAY 83 
 
 Macaulay. Treitschke himself would have re- 
 sented the comparison; for he has frequently 
 expressed his unreserved contempt for the historian 
 of the Revolution of 1688, arraigned his accuracy, 
 derided his estimates of men, challenged his 
 appreciation of facts, and stigmatized his philo- 
 sophy and his outlook upon human fate. He has 
 Macaulay 's hates and prejudices, his vituperative 
 energy; he has his power of fervent admiration. 
 Yet as a master of words, a stylist, Treitschke is 
 much inferior to Macaulay. His portraiture is 
 often an accumulation of minute details which have 
 never coalesced into a living personality. A Titian 
 portrait beside a Bronzino — that is the quality of 
 Macaulay 's style beside Treitschke's : for instance 
 the portraits of the Whig Junto beside those of 
 the men in whom Frederick William IV put his 
 trust. Treitschke at one time had wished to be a 
 poet, and he had considerable metrical skill. Yet 
 in speaking of poetry he is rarely a poet; and a 
 comparison of his patriotic verses with "The Lays 
 of Ancient Rome " is a fair measure of Treitschke's 
 inferiority to Macaulay as a writer. ^ 
 
 ^ Nietzsche as a stylist might have taught Treitschke much; 
 but against the creator of Zarathustra Treitschke was bitterly and 
 irreconcilably prejudiced from the very beginning of the former's 
 career, when Treitschke wrote of him to Overbeck as "that rum 
 fellow Nietzsche. " He even quarrelled with Overbeck because of 
 the latter's sympathy with his young colleague at Basle. His 
 roughness to Nietzsche in 1872 is not worse than Stein's roughness 
 to Goethe, and arose from similar causes. Treitschke divines in 
 
84 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 
 
 On the other hand, one may more justly compare 
 Treitschke's immense and enduring influence, not 
 only in Prussia but throughout the German world, 
 with the influence exercised by Carlyle upon 
 England since 1858.^ And Treitschke's influence 
 has gone on steadily increasing throughout Ger- 
 many until the present day. Treitschke and 
 Carlyle resemble each other in their high serious- 
 ness, sincerity, downrightness and deep moral 
 strength. Do not imagine, however, that there 
 is any further resemblance between them. For 
 instance, there is not in all the seventeen volumes 
 of Treitschke any hint of that broad human 
 laughter which you find in very nearly every page 
 of the thirty volumes of Carlyle. In all Treitschke 
 I doubt whether there is a single laugh. You may 
 say, if you like, that this is because Germany has 
 obtained free political institutions so recently and 
 therefore has not yet acquired the power to take 
 them humorously! 
 
 Treitschke, observe, is nothing if not a politician. 
 
 the author of **Unzeitgem§,sse Betrachtungen " "the good Euro- 
 pean" of later works; and therefore the bad Prussian, the bad 
 German. 
 
 ^ Carlyle was bom forty years before Treitschke, but Carlyle's 
 influence was slower in making itself felt; he was very late in 
 coming to his own in English life, very late in acquiring his reputa- 
 tion. The first thing that gave Carlyle a grip upon English people 
 was not "The French Revolution," published by him at two- 
 and-forty, but his "Cromwell," published at fifty. Treitschke's 
 influence at the universities dates from fifteen years after that. 
 
TREITSCHKE AND CARLYLE 85 
 
 Carlyle, in a sense, has no politics. Certainly 
 England never took Carlyle's politics seriously. 
 England listened wondering, sometimes amazed, 
 but always reverent, to his moral teaching. Every 
 book he wrote seemed to prove the truth of 
 Goethe's diagnosis of his character — " a new moral 
 force, the extent and effects of which it is impos- 
 sible to predict." But England has ignored ab- 
 solutely Carlyle's politics, whether in his attitude 
 towards the American War, or again in "Shooting 
 Niagara," or in ** Latter Day Pamphlets," or in 
 his view of the careers of Cromwell or Frederick — 
 that exaltation of beneficent despotism. Treitsch- 
 ke's political principles, on the other hand — 
 the doing of great things greatly, heroic action, 
 the glory of war, and the day of reckoning with 
 England — are the very essence of his power over 
 Germany. These principles underlie some of the 
 soundest German, and, above all, Prussian thought 
 at the present hour, as they have for the last 
 thirty years. 
 
 A further contrast between these two men is 
 this. Treitschke is ethical rather than meta- 
 physical. He has none of those dazzhng gleams 
 of profound metaphysical thought which con- 
 stantly uplift Carlyle. Nor do you find in him the 
 poetry of Nature which you find in Carlyle — that 
 feeling which gives Carlyle the power to turn from 
 the massacres there in the streets of Paris to the 
 fall of the autumn evening over French meadows. 
 
86 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 
 
 You do find, however, something of Carlyle's 
 vivid insight into character, especially when 
 Treitschke has the power of loving his characters 
 (and unless a man loves his characters he should 
 not write about them). This is noticeable in his 
 incursions into English history, and even more in 
 his studies of English literature. His sketch of 
 Milton is still one of the very finest of that great 
 man; and his sketch of Byron might quite easily 
 be placed with that of the Spanish writer, Nunez 
 de Arce. But, again, that which appeals to 
 Treitschke in Milton is the great political rebel. 
 It is not the writer of the fourth book of "Paradise 
 Lost," or of the first, or of the ninth, or of the 
 eleventh; it is the author of that noble pamphlet, 
 "The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates," which 
 Milton sat writing in the very week when Charles 
 I was being tried and doomed to death, Milton 
 feeling it incumbent upon himself as an English- 
 man, though he is not a member of that high court 
 of justice, to sit there day by day and night by 
 night trying Charles I, as he maintained that 
 every Englishman should try the king. So again, 
 to Treitschke, with his deep Teutonic moral 
 nature, it certainly is not the Byron of what, from 
 a literary standpoint, is Byron's masterpiece, 
 " Don Juan, " nor is it the poet of " Childe Harold " 
 that fascinates him. It is Byron's admiration and 
 enthusiasm for liberty; and to Treitschke Byron's 
 greatest verses are these: 
 
THE ANCESTORS OF TREITSCHKE 87 
 
 "Yet, Freedom! yet, thy banner torn but flying, 
 Streams, like the thunderstorm, against the wind; 
 Thy trumpet voice, tho' broken now and dying, 
 The loudest still the tempest leaves behind." 
 
 IV 
 
 Let me now sketch rapidly the life and career of 
 this astonishing man. 
 
 Like many notable Germans of the nineteenth 
 century, above all that German who is now begin- 
 ning to arrest the attention even of Englishmen — 
 for as a rule it takes at least half a century for any 
 true German thought to cross the North Sea! — 
 like Friedrich Nietzsche, and perhaps like Ranke 
 himself, Heinrich von Treitschke was Slavonic 
 in origin. His ancestors were Czechs who mi- 
 grated from Bohemia during the turmoils of the 
 Thirty Years' War and, seeking refuge from the 
 Jesuit plague, found security under the Protestant 
 Electors of Saxony. During the eighteenth cen- 
 tury they gradually rose in the favour of the ruling 
 House. Under the last Elector of Saxony a 
 Treitschke became a Privy Councillor. He sent 
 his sons into the army, secured for them in 1821 
 the syllable von, and before his death had the 
 pride or the vanity of seeing one of them command- 
 ant of the fortress of Konigstein, which still rises 
 in grey and impressive solitude on its tall rock 
 above the Elbe. This was Eduard von Treitschke, 
 the historian's father. 
 
88 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 
 
 Treitschke was bom at Dresden in September, 
 1834, one of the darkest and most disconsolate 
 periods in modern German history. The old ideals 
 were sinking; the new had not yet arisen. The 
 despotism of Mettemich lay like a dead hand upon 
 Austria and the South; the princes clung to their 
 privileges; Frederick William III still reigned in 
 Prussia. Schelling died that year, sunk in obscur- 
 antism; Arndt was a professor at Bonn; Tieck 
 had ceased to write; Wilhelm von Humboldt still 
 lived in honourable retirement at Schloss Tegel; 
 but Goethe had died two years before, and, a 
 year earlier than Goethe, Hegel and Niebuhr had 
 both passed away; Stein had died some months 
 after Niebuhr in solitude and estrangement from 
 his times, seeing not only Germany but Europe itself 
 rushing upon the abyss. Schleiermacher preached 
 for the last time in 1834. The heroes of the War 
 of Liberation were long dead, or lived, an embar- 
 rassment and a reproach, amid a generation which, 
 apathetic and indifferent, half wished to forget 
 their heroism. Scharnhorst had died of his 
 wounds at Prague (18 13), in the very hour of 
 Germany's glory; Bliicher, in 181 9; Yorck in 
 1830; and Gneisenau (just when entering upon the 
 Polish campaign), a Field-Marshal at last, had 
 died in 1831, like Hegel, of cholera, then raging 
 throughout Europe. Who was there left to repre- 
 sent the past splendours? And in the deep night 
 there was not a star to hint the coming dawn. 
 
HIS CHILDHOOD 89 
 
 Such was the world into which Treitschke was 
 bom.^ 
 
 In his childhood everything seemed to mark him 
 out as a Saxon, as destined, that is to say, to follow 
 a career in that country. Treitschke, however, 
 early discovered something that alienated him 
 from the career contemplated for him by his 
 father. His mother, who was of pure German 
 origin, was a reader of Willibald Alexis, above all 
 of those tales the scenes of which were placed in 
 the heroic times of Frederick the Great ; and when 
 Treitschke^s own tastes began to form they led him 
 as instinctively to the Wars of Liberation as 
 Rousseau's tastes had led him to Plutarch, or 
 Mirabeau's to Livy or the Rome of the Gracchi 
 and of Sulla. He took to the study of history; 
 and he discovered in that study the conduct of 
 Saxony in the past, the conduct of the Saxon 
 dynasty — perhaps the stupidest royal House in 
 Europe. He discovered the part played by Saxony 
 at Leipzig, and the yet more despicable part played 
 at Waterloo; and all that was German as distinct 
 from all that was particularist in that history took 
 possession of his imagination. 
 
 While he was still a boy his great heroes were not 
 the heroes of Saxony; they were all Prussians. 
 Just as in the eighteenth century the men of the 
 French Revolution foimd their inspiration in the 
 
 ^ Treitschke himself has described this period in the third 
 volume of his "Deutsche Geschichte." 
 
90 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 
 
 heroes of Plutarch, Caius Marius and Sulla and 
 Brutus, so Treitschke found his inspiration in the 
 Prussian heroes a la Plutarch, in those magnificent 
 figures which fill and adorn the pages of Prussian 
 history between 1809 and 18 13. His heroes are 
 Gneisenau, Bliicher's aide-de-camp, he who really 
 controlled Bliicher's actions in all matters of 
 diplomacy; and Schamhorst, of whom he has left 
 one of the most powerful sketches that German 
 literature possesses. Again, his hero is Stein, or 
 the philosopher Fichte, or Moritz Amdt the poet, 
 the son of a serf, author of the famous song, 
 ' ' Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland ? ' ' And there is 
 significance as well as authenticity in the anecdote 
 which depicts him as a boy of fifteen reading aloud 
 in the presence of Beust, one of Mettemich's most 
 repulsive satellites, an essay in the dithyrambic 
 manner rejoicing in the downfall of the princes 
 and exalting German unity, a unity which is to be 
 accomplished "by a race into whose blood has 
 passed in their youth the free and bracing winds of 
 the Baltic strand. " 
 
 It is while he is a boy also that there overtakes 
 him a disaster which tries the steel and stoicism 
 in him. He has described it for us in a volume of 
 verses published in 1856 — the coming upon him of 
 a fever, his slow recovery, and, at last, his astonish- 
 ment at the persistent sorrow on his mother's face, 
 despite his recovery. He describes his being taken 
 out into the garden on an early summer's day, 
 
DEAF 91 
 
 lying on a bench in the sun, seeing the bright skies 
 for the first time after what seemed months and 
 years. And then a strange thing happens. A 
 singular feeling comes over him of a vast and 
 unnatural silence. He sees the mounting lark ; he 
 hears no song. It is a silent universe. Terrified, 
 the child rushes back into the house, and there he 
 discovers the cause of the persistent sorrow on his 
 mother's face. He is nearly stone deaf, incurably 
 and for ever. 
 
 His description of the fight within himself back 
 to courage, stoicism, and acceptance of life is a 
 very remarkable passage in the poem ; and in this 
 passage something of Treitschke's temperament 
 throughout life is revealed. "There are men who 
 are doomed to pass their lives on broken wings," he 
 wrote later of Heinrich von Kleist, ** because some 
 malevolent chance has excluded them from that 
 sphere in which alone they could accomplish the 
 highest that is in them to do." To him in his 
 youth that "highest" vseemed his missed career of 
 action and war. For it is certain that Treitschke, 
 compelled to be a writer of books, would, but for 
 this disaster, have been a soldier. 
 
 His course of study was the usual course of a 
 young German of the time. Perhaps the greatest 
 moment in it was when he came to the University 
 of Bonn in 1851. There, amid the romance of the 
 scenery, the mountains, the distant view of the 
 spires of Koln — Balthazar, Gaspar, and Melchior, 
 
92 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 
 
 the Three Kings — the river, the castle from which 
 Roland had started, he knew the happiest period 
 of a university life. ''He who is not a poet in 
 Heidelberg or Bonn," he writes, "is dead to 
 poetry." The intellectual activities of the place 
 rapidly absorbed him. The aged poet, Moritz 
 Arndt, was still teaching history; and one can 
 imagine the thrill — ^indeed he himself has helped 
 us to imagine it — with which the young Treitschke, 
 with his enthusiasm for the heroes of the War of 
 Liberation, first looked upon those high and noble 
 features. Each successive phase of that heroic 
 action Arndt had witnessed; his own songs had 
 been part of the action ; he had been the compan- 
 ion and confidant of the great minister von Stein. 
 Even more powerful was the influence of another 
 of the Bonn professors — Friedrich Christ oph Dahl- 
 mann, the historian of Denmark. He too, like 
 Arndt, had played his part in the War of Libera- 
 tion, and at four-and-twenty he had walked across 
 Germany with the poet of Arminius, determined to 
 fight in the ranks of Austria, since Prussia was still 
 too timid or too weak to strike at the tyrant. In 
 the young student Arndt kindled memories and 
 sentiments ; but Dahlmann was at once an inspira- 
 tion as a lecturer and in private a friendly adviser. 
 Next perhaps to the influence of Arndt and 
 Dahlmann upon him was the influence of the Rhine. 
 It is hard for us in England to understand what the 
 Rhine really means to a German, the enthusiasm 
 
INFLUENCE OF THE RHINE 93 
 
 which he feels for that river. Treitschke himself 
 says of it, for instance, when he has to leave Bonn : 
 "To-morrow I shall see the Rhine for the last 
 time. The memory of that noble river " — and this 
 is not in a poem, observe, but simply in a letter to 
 a friend — "the memory of that noble river will 
 keep my heart pure and save me from sad or evil 
 thoughts throughout all the days of my life.'* 
 Try to imagine anyone saying that of the Thames ! 
 
 When Treitschke becomes a teacher himself and 
 a professor at Freiburg these are the influences 
 governing his teaching. His own career as a 
 teacher began at Leipzig in 1859, and he inaugu- 
 rated it in a striking enough manner by his treatise 
 on "The State. " This treatise might be described 
 as an abstract justification of monarchy, just as 
 Rousseau's famous Essay might with fairness be 
 described as an abstract justification of democracy. 
 Like every sincere attempt in the field of abstract 
 politics it is full of inconsistencies and contradic- 
 tions; but it reveals the central tendencies of 
 the author's mind. The friend of Bismarck, the 
 apologist of the Hohenzollern and the eager 
 admirer of Prussian bureaucracy already an- 
 nounces himself. The essence of the State, he 
 argues, is power; but it is a moral power, and in 
 virtue of this moral nature the authority of the 
 State over the individual is supreme and without 
 appeal. 
 
 Four years later, at Freiburg, he gave for the 
 
94 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 
 
 first time the lectures which developed afterwards 
 into the two volumes entitled ** Die Politik. " But 
 the stress of the period speedily tears Treitschke 
 from abstract speculation upon the State to living 
 politics and to the study of the actions of men in 
 the concrete. Bismarck's struggle with the Prus- 
 sian parliament is at its height. The safety and 
 prestige of the Prussian monarchy is not yet 
 assured. The dispute about the Duchies is at 
 hand, and behind it rises the war of 1864, and 
 behind the war of 1864 and the Convention of 
 Gastein loom the war of 1866, and Koniggratz, and 
 the creation of the North-German Confederation; 
 then the insulting half -maniacal jealousy of 
 France, and the war of 1870. 
 
 It is a new Germany, almost a new Europe. 
 Since the rise of the Spanish monarchy under 
 Ferdinand and Isabella and its liberation from the 
 Saracen dominion, and, at about the same period, 
 the rise of the French monarchy under Louis XI 
 and his successors, no event has so revolutionized 
 the European State-system. 
 
 Treitschke had originally been destined for the 
 army, and it is as a soldier of soldiers that we see 
 him in each phase of those momentous nine years. 
 *'Lay on my coffin a sword," the dying Heine 
 wrote in 1856. But the war in which Treitschke 
 fought was less vague than that dim war for the 
 freedom of humanity in which Heine imagined 
 himself a fighter. Treitschke was an enthusiast 
 
THE MAN 95 
 
 for freedom, as his essays on Milton and Byron as 
 well as scores of passages in his other writings 
 attest; but he plunged into the struggle to assert 
 the Prussian ascendency over Germany with all 
 the ardour with which, in an earlier age, Fichte 
 and Dahlmann had plunged into the War of 
 Liberation. At Freiburg, Kiel, and finally at 
 Heidelberg, his own enthusiasm communicated 
 itself to hundreds of students who heard him, and 
 ultimately to thousands. 
 
 His appearance at this period was striking: a 
 tall, rather slim figure, marked nobility of feature 
 and bearing, dark eyes and masses of thick dark 
 hair. He was sparing in gesture, abrupt and 
 effective, more chary of pure rhetoric than Droy- 
 sen, more regardful of fact than Hausser. His 
 voice was harsh, the Saxon accent unmistakable, 
 and he had often to pause for a word. He seldom 
 mixed with his audience after his lectures; his 
 deafness made this difficult, for, to a man of his 
 sensitiveness, an ear-trumpet in general company 
 was abhorrent. But this was no real drawback; 
 it rather invested the speaker and his impassioned 
 utterances with a touch of prophetic remoteness. 
 
 "Is Treitschke an orator at all?" an English 
 admirer of his writings once asked a member of 
 the Reichstag. "In the sense in which Mr. 
 Gladstone was an orator," was the reply, "cer- 
 tainly not. In the Reichstag he is always listened 
 to with respect ; he never kindles enthusiasm ; and 
 
96 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 
 
 yet, if the art of the rhetor is to compel men to 
 action, how many greater orators are there in 
 modern Germany, or, for that matter, in modern 
 France or England, than simply Heinrich von 
 Treitschke? When I first heard him many years 
 ago I had been reading Palacky's History of 
 Bohemia. You know the book? Well, in the 
 thick of Ziska's tremendous duel I constantly saw 
 young Treitschke — ^for at that time he was not 
 more than thirty — pass between me and the page 
 like a Hussite warrior, authentic, irresistible, a 
 spiritual fatalist, like Racine's Joad girding on his 
 sword in the name of the Lord of Hosts. And see, 
 yonder he comes." 
 
 The excitement, the momentary pallor on the 
 speaker's face, proved to the Englishman more 
 powerfully than words the dominion which intel- 
 lect united to moral greatness exercises over other 
 men. He pointed to a solitary figure walking with 
 a stick slowly down the shady path of the splendid 
 street Unter den Linden. He walked as the deaf 
 always walk, glancing rapidly from side to side. 
 It was impossible to resist the melancholy if 
 penetrating strength in the dark and luminous 
 eyes, eyes of a type which one seldom meets in 
 England, full of meditative depth and integrity, 
 trust-winning. Once, where the crowd was less, 
 he raised a soft grey felt wide-awake hat, for the 
 day was hot, and the noble forehead was for 
 a second visible. Involuntarily the Englishman 
 
THE CENTRAL THEME 97 
 
 raised his own hat with an instinct of reverence. 
 That was in the summer of 1892.^ 
 
 The years in which Treitschke wrote his great- 
 est book are also the years of his greatest fame as 
 a lecturer. Probably no German professor, not 
 Fichte, not Schlosser, not Droysen, has ever 
 commanded such audiences. His lecture-hall in 
 Berlin did actually suggest a concourse such 
 as, in the Middle Age, met to hear an Abelard, 
 or, in the Renaissance time, thronged around 
 Giordano Bruno or Pico della Mirandola. 
 
 And it was a true message, a *' gospel, " which 
 they came to hear, a gospel which the commonest 
 could understand, which the most cultured could 
 not disdain. His subject, of course, was History, 
 or it was Politics; but through all the mazes of 
 historical narrative, carefully documented, fact on 
 fact torn from hours in the Berlin archives, and 
 amid all the mazes of political speculation, close 
 and stern reasoning, sometimes repellent by its 
 accumulation of apparently redundant matter 
 and irrelevant illustration — amid all this a man's 
 soul was wrestling almost visibly to bring home to 
 his hearers his own burning conviction of the great- 
 ness of Germany, her past, her present, and the 
 
 ^ Treitschke's influence in the Reichstag was much greater than 
 that of men like Lecky or Jebb or other university members in the 
 British Parliament. It was more akin perhaps to that of John 
 Stuart Mill when he was returned for Westminster, or to that of 
 Macaulay. 
 
98 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 
 
 unfathomable vistas which open out before her in 
 the future. 
 
 That is Treitschke's central theme. It is the 
 informing thought of each of his distinctive books 
 or collections of writings — the five volumes of his 
 History, the two volumes of his '* Politik," his 
 two series of '' Deutsche Kampfe, his " Bilder aus 
 der deutschen Geschichte," his political essays 
 and literary portraits, above all, his magnificent 
 full-length portraits of Dahlmann and of the poet 
 Heinrich von Kleist. 
 
 V 
 
 Treitschke has no philosophy of History in the 
 sense in which Hegel or Buckle or Cousin has a 
 philosophy of History. He has come too late into 
 the world for that. But in a wider sense, like 
 every true German historian, he has a philosophy 
 of History. There is nothing in which German 
 historians more completely differ from English 
 historians than in this respect. No German 
 historian is ever satisfied that he has the right to 
 teach history until he has acquired for himself 
 by individual vision, or adopted from another, 
 whether Kant or Hegel or Lotze or Nietzsche, 
 some general view, some theory of the working of 
 God in History. To him History is a drama in 
 which God is the supreme actor. And Treitschke 
 has such a vision or theory. 
 
GOD IN HISTORY 99 
 
 What, then, did that audience, consisting of 
 princes and officials, of soldiers and diplomats 
 and sometimes the most prominent figures in the 
 Berlin fashionable world, come together to hear? 
 They came, indeed, to hear of the greatness of 
 Germany in other years and in other centuries. 
 They saw pass before them in rapid sketches the 
 grandiose or tragic forms of the Suabian and the 
 Saxon dynasties. They were made to thrill with 
 patriotic pride or admiration when, in speaking of 
 a yet later age, the orator described in mordant 
 words of contempt or denunciation the desperate 
 conflict of France, Spain, England and Holland for 
 exterior wealth and power, seeking a dominion 
 upon which the sun shall never set, whilst, solitary, 
 deep-thinking, Germany is sunk in moral and 
 religious absorption, pursuing the freedom of the 
 spirit, poring over the abyss of absolute idealit}^ 
 founding a spiritual empire. Or the gates of Sans 
 Souci were flung open and it was the great privi- 
 lege of Treitschke's hearers to behold its builder 
 painted with a Velasquez-like realism and a Velas- 
 quez-like sympathy, with profound imaginative in- 
 sight and vision. But before all and above all that 
 audience came together to hear the story of the 
 manner in which God or the world-spirit, through 
 shifting and devious paths, had led Germany and 
 the Germans to their present exalted station under 
 Prussia and the Hohenzollern, those great princes 
 who in German worth and German uprightness — 
 
100 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 
 
 Aufrichtigkeit — are unexampled in the dynasties of 
 Europe or of the world. Treitschke showed them 
 German unity, and therefore German freedom, 
 lying like the fragments of a broken sword, a magic 
 sword like that of Roland, or of Sigurd, or the 
 Grey-Steel of the Sagas; and these fragments 
 Prussia alone could weld again into dazzling 
 wholeness and might. 
 
 This is Treitschke's governing idea — the great- 
 ness of Prussia, the glory of an army which is a 
 nation and of a nation which is an army. ^ 
 
 A great Greek historian, Dion Cassius, writing 
 of the Roman Empire — a Greek historian, observe, 
 writing of the Roman Empire — said that his 
 conception and vision of the supreme end of 
 humanity was the whole world governed by the 
 divinely-appointed State of Rome. Similarly I 
 should say that this conception of the German 
 Fatherland, the whole German kindred, governed 
 by Prussia and by the House of HohenzoUem is 
 
 * To Giesebrecht also Germany Is the nation of nations, the 
 people of peoples. Droysen is even more explicit. At the period 
 of the Schleswig-Holstein war he declared that to the Hohen- 
 zoUem belonged the throne left empty or occupied by usurpers 
 since the death of Konradin. His "History of Prussian Policy," 
 based on lectures at Jena, is governed by a similar idea. The 
 last volume appeared posthumously in 1886. It is a pamphlet, 
 and false as a pamphlet. It is impossible to read without a smile 
 the portraiture of the early Electors of Brandenburg as "creators 
 of the German idea, following, as mariners a lodestar, the con- 
 ception of German unity. " 
 
A UNITED GERMANY loi 
 
 the underlying theme of the Saxon Treitschke 
 addressing a Prussian audience. And just as it 
 had been necessary that Rome should first conquer 
 the world in order to rule it in justice, so it had 
 been necessary that Prussia should dominate 
 Germany in order to give to Germany present 
 unity and future grandeur. 
 
 When Treitschke turns from Prussia, when he 
 turns from the War of Liberation in 1813 and casts 
 his glance backwards across German history, that 
 history catches fire tmder his pen from the power 
 and the illumination of this same idea. The 
 whole movement of Germany from Charlemagne, 
 the House of Hohenstaufen, the great heroic past 
 of the Holy Roman Empire, from the time of the 
 Reformation and of Frederick the Great to that of 
 Gneisenau and Stein, is towards this consum- 
 mation — a united Germany under the supremacy 
 of Prussia. And now upon what a career of 
 high-uplifted glory shall not that mighty nation 
 start! Once united, who shall set bounds to this 
 Germany? What dream of the mediaeval em- 
 perors, what dream of a Frederick II, ''the Wonder 
 of the World, " of a Barbarossa, of an Otto I, but 
 shall be surpassed by this Germany that he, Hein- 
 rich von Treitschke, sees arise within the frontiers 
 of his imagination, scanning the future, brooding 
 on things to come! 
 
 And Fate was strangely kind to Treitschke. 
 Though dwelling in that silent universe of the 
 
102 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 
 
 deaf, and threatened in age with the darkened 
 universe of the blind, he lived just long enough to 
 see upon the silver horizon of the North Sea, and 
 upon the more mysterious horizon of the Future, 
 the first promise of the German fleets of the 
 future. He saw Germany thus fitting herself for 
 that high task which he had marked out to one 
 generation after another of students — the day of 
 reckoning with England, the day of reckoning with 
 the great enemy for whom he had nevertheless that 
 kind of regard which every great foe inspires, which 
 England's strength inspires. And yet his imagi- 
 nation pierced beneath the semblance of her 
 strength, which to his imagination was but a 
 semblance. 
 
 VI 
 
 What are the origins of this antagonism or this 
 antipath}!^ in Treitschke to England and to things 
 English? The question is worth asking; for there 
 is no disputing Treitschke's immense influence not 
 only upon his own generation but upon the whole 
 of modern German thought. 
 
 This attitude of mind does not begin with him; 
 it is present in the Heidelberg School, in Hausser, 
 for instance, and in Schlosser; and Dahlmann's 
 ** History of the English Revolution" is capable of 
 many interpretations. But in Treitschke the 
 antagonism reaches a height and persistence of 
 rancour or contempt which in so great a man is 
 
ORIGINS OF TREITSCHKE'S ANTIPATHY 103 
 
 arresting if not unique. To him the greatness of 
 England passes with the seventeenth century, 
 with Cromwell and Milton. 
 
 The origins of this sentiment are partly histor- 
 ical, partly moral, and, in Treitschke, must be 
 sought in his character as a man and as a patriot. 
 Britain's world -predominance outrages him as a 
 man almost as much as it outrages him as a Ger- 
 man. It outrages him as a man because of its 
 immorality, its arrogance and its pretentious 
 security. It outrages him as a German because he 
 attributes England's success in the war for the 
 world to Germany's preoccupation with higher 
 and more spiritual ends. But for her absorption 
 in those ends and the civil strife in which that 
 absorption resulted, Germany might, in the seven- 
 teenth and eighteenth centuries, have made the 
 Danube a German river and established a German 
 predominance from the Bosphorus to the Indus. 
 
 The sentiment has also its roots in history, 
 recent and remote. "France," said Bismarck in 
 September, 1870, ''must be paralyzed; for she will 
 never forgive us our victories." And in the same 
 spirit Treitschke avers : England will never forgive 
 us our strength. And not without justice he 
 delineates English policy throughout the eigh- 
 teenth and nineteenth centuries as aimed con- 
 sistently at the repression of Prussia, so soon as 
 English politicians discovered the true nature of 
 that State and divined the great future reserved for 
 
104 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 
 
 it by destiny. Had not England been Prussia's 
 treacherous but timid enemy in 1864 and 1866, and 
 again in 1870-71, and, above all, in 1874-75? 
 
 But the strongest motive is the conviction, 
 which becomes more intense as the years advance, 
 that Britain's world-predominance is out of all 
 proportion to Britain's real strength and to her 
 worth or value, whether that worth be considered 
 in the political, the social, the intellectual, or the 
 moral sphere. It is the detestation of a sham. 
 "In this universe of ours the thing that is 
 wholly a sham — wholly rotten — may endure for a 
 time, but cannot endure for ever." This is the 
 protest of the stern apostle of reality. He fre- 
 quently rings the changes on the "nation of shop- 
 keepers," pointing with aptness and justice to the 
 general meanness and gradually increasing sordid- 
 ness of English political life. That which Treitsch- 
 ke hates in England is what Napoleon hated 
 in England — sl pretentiousness, an overweening 
 middle-class self-satisfaction, which is not really 
 patriotism, not the high and serious passion of 
 Germany in 18 13 and 1870, but an insular narrow 
 conceit ; in fact, the emotion enshrined in that most 
 vulgar of all national hymns, "Rule Britannia"! 
 
 "The nations not so blest as thee 
 Must in their turn to tyrants fall, 
 Whilst thou shalt flourish, great and free 
 The dread and envy of them all." 
 
TREITSCHKE'S ANTI-ENGLISHISM 105 
 
 Consider the world-picture which that upcalls ! A 
 single island usurping the glory of freedom, sur- 
 rounded by a world groaning beneath tyrants, 
 whilst she sits in lonely grandeur! 
 
 For Treitschke it is not genius, it is not valour, 
 it is not even great policy, as in the case of Venice, 
 which has built up the British Empire; but the 
 hazard of her geographical situation, the supine- 
 ness of other nations, the measureless duplicity of 
 her ministers, and the natural and innate hypocrisy 
 of the nation as a whole. These have let this 
 monstrous empire grow — a colossus with feet of 
 clay. Along with this he has the conviction that 
 such a power can be overthrown. And with what 
 a stem joy and self-congratulation would not the 
 nations acclaim the destruction of the island- 
 State, ''Old England," old, indeed, and corrupt, 
 rotten through and through ! 
 
 The sincerity as well as the intensity of Treitsch- 
 ke's anti-Englishism is attested by the sponta- 
 neity and variety with which it finds expression. 
 The indignation of Schlosser, judging his con- 
 temporaries as Dante judged his contemporaries, 
 is a dispersed indignation; Treitschke's is concen- 
 trated upon England only. His inventiveness is 
 astonishing. Here he takes up a phrase of Mon- 
 tesquieu, who in "The Spirit of Laws" makes 
 England, so to speak, the hero of that great and 
 perfect book, and he turns Montesquieu's judg- 
 ment into an occasion for a diatribe not only 
 
io6 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 
 
 against French character in the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, but against the whole character of EngHsh 
 history. At another time he attacks the private 
 character of the EngHsh in a manner that recalls 
 Nietzsche's witty apophthegm, when, speaking of 
 the part played by danger and suffering in the 
 heroic life, he observes, **Man, after all, does not 
 really desire happiness; only the Englishman 
 does that," thus adroitly placing the Englishman 
 outside the pale of humanity altogether. But 
 Treitschke is seldom witty, though often grossly 
 if unintentionally offensive. He is as unable 
 as Heine to see anything fine in the English 
 character. 
 
 ** Foreign critics do not like my books? That is 
 natural. I write for Germans, not foreigners," he 
 answered with impatient contempt when an 
 admirer pointed out to him the injury he did to his 
 chances of a European success like that of Ranke 
 or Mommsen. And in the love and measureless 
 admiration of his own nation he has had his 
 reward. 
 
 One final question. When, by the light of what 
 is called ** impartial history,"^ one considers the 
 events of the last century in their bearing on 
 Treitschke's theory of Germany's future, whither 
 does Germany in that century, at once in politics 
 
 ^ Of course there is no such thing as "impartial history," and 
 even if there could be impartial history it would be the dullest, 
 stupidest thing on this earth of ours. 
 
GERMAN CONTRASTS 107 
 
 and in thought, really seem to be moving? In the 
 first place, if we contrast the Germany of the 
 present day with the old half -idyllic, half -despotic 
 Germany of Goethe's great youth and early fame, ^ 
 of Lessing's manhood, of Schiller's early years, of 
 Herder and the Jacobis — that Germany, almost 
 patriarchal in its simplicity, quite clearly has 
 passed away for ever. Its exclusive ideal was 
 culture, not patriotism, and the first word in cul- 
 ture always is Mankind, Humanitas, Humanity. 
 It was essentially, that is to say, a cosmopolitan 
 Germany. Goethe, for instance, when his whole 
 nation, convulsed by the war against Napoleon, is 
 looking to him for guidance — ^how does the great 
 poet of Germany act? He turns aside altogether 
 from the present and resolutely fixes his imagi- 
 nation upon Persia! Upon Persian poetry, the 
 Persian Divans, the beauties of Jallal'ud'din, of 
 Hafiz, of Sa'di! And in regard to Napoleon he 
 said to a German friend, "That fellow is far too 
 strong for you; you'll never do anything against 
 him." But men can now no longer say with 
 Jacobi, "I hear on every side nowadays the word 
 'German,' but who is a German? I strive in vain 
 as yet to attach any precise meaning to the term" ; 
 or with Lessing himself that patriotism is nothing 
 but an heroic weakness that he for one is glad to be 
 
 *That is to say, the period in which he writes "Werther,** 
 the First Part of "Wilhelm Meister," and the First Part of 
 "Faust, " and those great dramas " Iphigenie" and "Tasso. " 
 
io8 TREITSCHKE AND YOUNG GERMANY 
 
 rid of; or with Herder, ** Of all kinds of pride I hold 
 national pride the most foolish; it ruined Greece; 
 it ruined Judasa and Rome." Gone, too, are the 
 days of Karl Immermann, who could never follow 
 a political debate because he could form no image 
 of such abstractions. ^ 
 
 There you have that earlier, and, if you choose 
 to call it so, that greater Germany. But what 
 Treitschke sees underneath that is the Germany of 
 the War of Liberation, Prussia renascent, and her 
 steady advance throughout the nineteenth century 
 to the present day. And as Treitschke, casting his 
 eyes back to primitive German history, sees arise 
 there the religion of the valiant, the religion of 
 Valour, so now, with this informing thought in the 
 mind, we can trace in the Germany of 191 3 like a 
 dawn upon the horizon, piercing like a sun through 
 all the transient mists of industrialism, socialism, 
 militarism, the vision of that same religion return- 
 ing to Germany — that Religion of Valour. 
 
 ^ That was the Germany very largely of Hegel; it certainly was 
 the Germany of Kant. And to him also, I daresay, though we 
 have no record of it, it would have been difficult to associate, 
 there at Konigsberg, any particular meaning with the words 
 " German patriotism. " 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 In speaking the concluding words on a great sub- 
 ject the endeavour to choose from among the mul- 
 titude of ideas which throng in upon the mind 
 discourages the imagination, oppressing it with a 
 sense of the inadequacy, if not the uselessness, of 
 any effort to pierce the future or to trace its prob- 
 able course in the history of two nations. How is 
 it possible to discover any principle which will 
 enable us to conjecture, even in outline, the future 
 of two such empires as Germany and England? 
 
 I remember that narrative in Ordericus of the 
 death-bed of one of our greatest kings, one of the 
 most heroic and tragic figures of modem history. 
 Dying, he augured of the future; he saw disaster 
 descending upon his own work and upon this na- 
 tion; he augured of the conduct and careers of 
 individuals. The irony in a Greek tragedy, in 
 which Destiny seems to take a clear joy in making 
 sport of the anticipations and desires of men, is 
 not more scornful than the irony with which Des- 
 tiny turned to nothingness the auguries of the 
 
 109 
 
no PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 dying Norman, alike in regard to individuals and 
 to nations. 
 
 The temptation therefore is to be silent, to avoid 
 any prophecy whatever, to say bluntly and at 
 once, "The future is impenetrable," or again, "It 
 is inevitable as the past" — equally inevitable 
 whether we regard the bloody strivings of this 
 universe as blind chance or as the eternal unwind- 
 ing and winding of a predetermined or arbitrary 
 scheme. 
 
 Yet History itself becomes mere picturesque 
 anecdote as in Macaulay, or an unending series of 
 brilliant biographies as in Carlyle, or a staid recon- 
 struction of Council or Parliamentary procedure as 
 in Hallam and Stubbs, unless, after a long sojourn 
 in the past and a steady gaze into the future out of 
 the past, the present becomes, as it were, trans- 
 parent and the forms of the future, dim and colos- 
 sal like clouds or the dark procession of trees 
 reflected in water, become obscurely visible. 
 Unless the study of the past of two such nations as 
 Germany and England, nations which some fifteen 
 hundred years ago lived side by side within their 
 native woods, enables one to form some percep- 
 tion, to attain to some Ahnung, as a German would 
 say, of the inward fate which shapes the destiny of 
 nations, History itself in any true sense becomes 
 impossible. 
 
 In support of this principle I may point out that 
 between the lives of nations and of individual men 
 
DESTINY OF NATIONS AND MEN in 
 
 there is, after all, another distinction than that of 
 longevity. The final test is not arithmetic; for 
 whilst he who ventures to vaticinate on the career 
 of an individual, to generalize upon its future 
 course from temperament or from strength of 
 purpose, may in an instant be derided by some of 
 the myriad forms which "Chance" assumes — a 
 sudden illness, a street accident, some untoward 
 occurrence from the past, the action of a friend or 
 enemy — he who deals with the careers of nations 
 and peoples is secure from such misadventures. 
 In the life of a nation "accident," or "Chance," 
 the dread mistress of accident, plays a part so 
 slight that it can all but be ignored. It is this, 
 therefore, which subordinates the history of na- 
 tions to law and to cause and effect rather than, 
 as in the individual life, to accident. The power 
 of cause and effect, however commonly it may be 
 talked of, is, in the individual life, a minimum. 
 Many years ago Schopenhauer pointed out the 
 force of this contrast. War, indeed, seems to ex- 
 pose a nation to fortune ; yet Russia is already re- 
 covering from the campaign in Manchuria, Mukden 
 is forgotten, and Russia has resumed her resistless 
 path, slow as the movement of a glacier but as 
 sure. 
 
 And there is another respect in which the des- 
 tiny of nations differs from the destiny of men. 
 In the conscious action of individuals motive or 
 purpose is supreme; but the forces which govern 
 
112 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 the action of States approximate more closely to 
 the operation of causes in the natural world. 
 They can more readily be grouped under laws. 
 A science of politics thus becomes possible; a 
 philosophy of history a pursuit. Religion is the 
 very essence of both; history becomes religion, 
 religion history; for ultimately the supreme Actor 
 in history and in politics is God. Time's drama, 
 world rising behind world, universe behind uni- 
 verse, is His drama ; its theatre this f ar-outspanned 
 fabric of star-drift and suns, of fire-cloud and sunk 
 system blackening in ether; and here, on this 
 planet, great nations, cities and empires are the 
 brief embodiments or the transient realizations of 
 His desires. Thus the nearer man's portraiture of 
 God approaches to reality the nearer will his philo- 
 sophy of history approach to a complete harmony 
 between semblance and substance, that is, towards 
 Truth. For History, the course of events, is not 
 the light, but, as its name, laxopca implies, a 
 continuous searching for the light — the world- 
 spirit down the ages seeking the realization of its 
 ultimate desire, a tragic realization because it can 
 only end in the destruction of the world-soul's 
 Being as such. 
 
 Regarding this universe and man's history, then, 
 as a movement towards a fixed end and a tragic 
 end, how shall one determine the sphere or define 
 the operation of cause and of law in the history of 
 nations? For just as from the motion of a planet 
 
THE TREND OF NATIONS 113 
 
 it is possible to gauge something of its future 
 course, so from the history of nations it is possible 
 to gauge their course because of this approximation 
 in them to cause and effect. But, again, if this 
 cause and effect is really to be estimated, measured, 
 the utmost care must be taken that it is the true 
 cause and the true effect that is examined. No- 
 thing is more common in modem times than to 
 speak of cause and effect, especially in regard to 
 history; yet in man's history nothing is more 
 difficult than to attain to something like a just 
 conception of a true cause. Roughly speaking, I 
 should define any cause to which an historical 
 event is ascribed as a true cause when it can be 
 submitted to the categories of universality and 
 necessity. It must be possible to give a true 
 cause the form of a law, and that law must be 
 imiversal in its application; that is to say, its 
 operation must be the same in other circumstances 
 and even in other worlds, and its operation must 
 be inevitable. 
 
 Let me select an example from the history of 
 Germany, an example, indeed, from the history of 
 the Teutonic race itself. 
 
 In studying so complex and varied a movement 
 as the Reformation, if we contented ourselves, as 
 used to be the practice, with assigning the cause of 
 that movement to Luther's happening to find a 
 Latin Bible at Erfurt, and if we then proceeded to 
 test that cause by the criterion of imiversaHty and 
 
 8 
 
114 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 necessity, we should require to affirm that when- 
 ever and in whatever circumstances an individual 
 man discovers the original text of a religion, such 
 a movement as the Reformation must inevitably 
 follow. The vice in this argument is self-evident. 
 We are compelled to look elsewhere for the cause 
 of the Reformation than in the career of Luther; 
 and still less can we seek it in a single incident of 
 that career, whether his discovery of the Vulgate 
 or his study of the writings of St. Paul. 
 
 If, on the other hand, we affirm that to any race 
 or nation, dowered with creative genius in reli- 
 gion, which shall, at an early period of its career, 
 adopt the religion of a more civilized race, a time 
 must come when the former race shall examine the 
 truth of that religion and by the mere force of its 
 own nature press on towards another, higher 
 truth; and if we submit the Reformation to the 
 operation of this law and study it as a movement 
 which, declaring itself as early as the thirteenth 
 century, gradually reaches its climax in the six- 
 teenth, and passes into a new phase and a new 
 purpose in the eighteenth, then we have arrived 
 at what may be described as a vera causa^ a true 
 cause, a cause, that is to say, which we can imagine 
 as operative in all times and places, amongst all 
 nations and even in other spheres of being than 
 ours. 
 
 It would be easy to illustrate this still further 
 by the contrast between the alleged and the real 
 
DISCOVERY OF CAUSES 115 
 
 causes, say, of the French Revolution, or the 
 Hundred Years' War against France, or the fall 
 of Rome or of Venice. Only a year ago, in speak- 
 ing of the causes of the French Revolution, I 
 pointed out how superficial is that view of the 
 French Revolution which attributes it only to the 
 writings of Voltaire and of Rousseau. How com- 
 mon is that explanation! Yet if you universalize 
 this seeming cause of the French Revolution that 
 too evaporates. 
 
 But if true causes in history are difficult to dis- 
 cover, it does not follow that they are undiscover- 
 able, or that, in our effort to attain to a perception 
 of the deep underlying forces in the inward fate 
 and destiny of nations, some true cause may not 
 disclose itself and make the gauging, the measuring, 
 the computing with regard to the future, something 
 more than mere conjecture; and it is this which 
 renders it possible to deal with our subject here 
 to-day. 
 
 II 
 
 In the present and future relations of England 
 and Germany is it, then, possible out of the past 
 to discover the operation of such forces or causes 
 as will enable us to conjecture the future roles 
 of these two nations? 
 
 First of all, it is evident that the region in which 
 one must seek them is the region in which Eng- 
 land's needs come most sharply into conflict with 
 
ii6 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 Germany's desires. And here a law, obvious, 
 universal and inevitable in its application, dis- 
 closes itself. It concerns the struggle for power. 
 Amongst free independent nations weakness means 
 war; and the empire which is not prepared to 
 defend itself by forces proportionate to the mag- 
 nitude of that empire must fall. 
 
 The period at which an empire becomes sta- 
 tionary can never be more than approximately 
 determined. Thus in the history of Rome it may 
 be assigned to the sixty years between the acces- 
 sion of Hadrian and the death of Marcus Aurelius ; 
 and in that of Venice to the fifty years between 
 the dogeship of Antonio Grimani and that of 
 Luigi Mocenigo. But in each case that period 
 also announces the beginning of the decline; for 
 here again nations are subject to the operations of 
 natural law, and it may be affirmed that' the 
 empire which has ceased to advance has begun to 
 recede and therefore to decline, and the empire 
 which has begun to decline is dead already. 
 
 There comes, for instance, a moment in the 
 history of Rome when the question of putting an 
 end to Rome's attempt to govern the whole world 
 is repeatedly before Roman thinkers and politi- 
 cians. And from the first century of the Roman 
 era men recalled a strange circumstance. When 
 the city was founded the assembled gods each 
 gave to Rome some beneficence, some great faculty 
 peculiar to himself; but Terminus, the god of 
 
IS THERE A LIMIT? 117 
 
 Boundaries, of Limitations, on that memorable 
 day refused his gift, defying even the master of 
 the gods, Jupiter himself. And the Roman au- 
 gtu-ers took this as a symbol that in the future 
 there should be no boundaries set to Rome's 
 dominion, that there never would come a time 
 when she should abandon her world-mission. In 
 the reign of Hadrian, however, there came at last 
 a moment when a term was set to Rome's advance, 
 when, from jealousy of his predecessor Trajan, 
 Hadrian gave back the former's Eastern conquests 
 and withdrew within the earlier limits of the 
 empire. And the wits of Rome then said that 
 the god Terminus, who had defied Jupiter, had 
 yielded most courteously to the Emperor Hadrian ! 
 
 Has such a moment come for England? Is 
 there any reason why we should now tolerate the 
 courtesy of the god Terminus? Is there a limit 
 to our expansion? Until the last decade of the 
 nineteenth century the history of Imperial Britain 
 is one of rapid and easy advance, in the Mediter- 
 ranean, in the Atlantic, in the Southern Seas, 
 amongst the Pacific Isles. Did she reach in that 
 decade that stage when an empire, ceasing to 
 advance, has begun to recede and therefore to 
 decline? And was the Boer War a proof at once 
 of her weakness and her strength? This is the 
 real problem of imperialism in 19 13. 
 
 In contrast to this, what of Germany? I have 
 described the attitude of the youth of Germany, 
 
ii8 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 soldiers, students, professors, politicians, writers 
 of books. Their position is clear. ''Are we to 
 acquiesce," they ask, ''in England's possession of 
 one-fifth of the globe, with no title-deeds, no claim, 
 except priority in robbery? Our greatest teachers 
 so describe it." And I showed you how young 
 Germans of the twentieth century can, in support 
 of this position, appeal to the representations of 
 English history by many of the most commanding 
 intellects of their own nation, expressed in guarded 
 or unguarded terms. They can even cite the 
 Englishman Seeley as a witness to the dominion 
 which hazard has played in England's uncouth 
 and unmerited grandeur. She is the Malvolio of 
 nations; greatness has been thrust upon her. 
 
 And then follows the fixed and inevitable con- 
 clusion, now silent but deeply and passionately 
 resentful, now clamorous and aggressive, as in 
 the Prussian war-party and its adherents in every 
 rank of Prussian life: "Is all indeed lost; and is the 
 war for the world ended? In the world-arena has 
 Germany, like a belated champion, girt in her 
 shining armour, ridden up to the great tourney 
 too late? Has Destiny, like a herald, by a trum- 
 pet's sound proclaimed the lists closed? Must the 
 splintered sword which Germany has at last suc- 
 ceeded in welding into a solid blade so dazzling 
 and terrific — ^must it indeed rest in its sheath for 
 ever? Can the youth of Germany acquiesce in 
 this cowardly renunciation and not forfeit honour 
 
DOMINION OR DEATH 119 
 
 and, with honour, manhood?" Hence the real 
 force and the real meaning of Bernhardi's iterated 
 watchword: "Empire or Downfall — Weltmacht 
 oder Niedergang^ It is as if he said: ''World- 
 dominion or Death." 
 
 Such then is the situation and such are the 
 problems which in the immediate future confront 
 all that is young, all that is ardent throughout 
 Germany, in those teeming cities and towns, those 
 universities and gymnasia. Every decade, every 
 half decade leaves the question more poignant. 
 With every advance in her conscious strength 
 which the Germany of Wilhelm II makes on land 
 or in the air or on the sea the necessity of an answer 
 will become more imperious, the terms of the 
 problem more strict and confined, and, other 
 things remaining the same, the resultant rancour 
 of mind more feverish. ^ 
 
 ^ Other contingencies than war with England are possible in 
 the immediate future. A war with France, as a military critic 
 insists, may break out at any moment, and, assuming that Eng- 
 land stands cynically aloof, that war, if France is permitted to 
 work out her three-years system, may end in a drawn game, 
 though by its savage fury leaving both nations so weak from 
 haemorrhage that a quarter of a century will be necessary for 
 either to recover its prestige. On the other hand, Germany may 
 » decide not to await the development of the three-years system 
 in France, and, trusting to diplomats and to her present enormous 
 superiority in numbers, may strike France without a declaration 
 of war and overwhelm her by sheer weight. 
 
 This is Bernhardi's interpretation of Germany's duty, for it 
 would leave Germany front to front with England. France 
 
120 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 III 
 
 Now let me examine the subject more from the 
 standpoint of history than that of politics. Burke 
 long since deprecated the drawing up of an indict- 
 ment against a whole nation, and Sir Thomas 
 Browne in a famous passage has stigmatized "the 
 sin against charity" involved in all such indict- 
 ments. It is scarcely less hazardous or less diffi- 
 cult to characterize with sureness the temper or 
 the mood of a people in this or that period of its 
 history. And yet when such familiarity as leisure 
 affords and unbiased inquiry, anxious only to see 
 the thing as in very deed it is^ and as in very deed 
 it has arisen, leave a definite impression on the 
 mind, it can hardly be a ''sin against charity" 
 
 humiliated, the incorporation, on advantageous terms, of Holland 
 with the German Empire would be easy. The submission or 
 annexation of Belgium would follow of itself. 
 
 With regard to the enmity between Russia and Germany, in 
 Germany's antagonism to Russia there is nothing fateful, nothing 
 organic. It is a wound that, as Bismarck once very profoundly 
 said, can be cauterized at any moment, because there is not and 
 never has been any innate cause for war between Germany and 
 Russia. Germany does not seek Constantinople ; her patronage 
 of Turkey was the natural reply to the unnatural alliance of 
 France and Russia. But the enmity of England and Germany 
 is like one of those springs that rise from the nether deep ; the 
 more you try to fill them up the wider they become. 
 
 ^ To me the most disquieting thing in our relations to Germany 
 is our politicians' fixed resolution to see things other than as 
 they are. 
 
GERMANY'S HERO-IDEAL 121 
 
 or render me subject to the accusation of rashness 
 if I state that impression. 
 
 Already the minds which determine the action 
 of nations, touched with the lure of world-domin- 
 ion, compare the resolution and emotion which 
 this vision of Germany's future stirs in its devo- 
 tees to the emotion and great resolve of Faust, 
 when, conquering his past and freed from his re- 
 morses, he wakens amid the glittering solitudes 
 of the Alps, sees the sun above the summits, sees 
 the rainbow span the cataract, and speaks the 
 noble verses : 
 
 "Du, Erde, wapst auch diese Nacht bestandig 
 Und atmest neu erquickt zu meinen Fiissen, 
 Beginnest schon mit Lust mich zu umgeben. 
 Du regst und riihrst ein kraftiges Beschliessen, 
 Zum hocbsten Dasein immerfort zu streben. "^ 
 
 But what, it may be asked, is that highest being, 
 that highest ideal? It is world-dominion; it is 
 world-empire; it is the hegemony of a planet. It 
 assigns to Germany in the future a role like that 
 which Rome or Hellas or Judsa or Islam have 
 played in the past. That is Germany's hero- 
 ideal. It is at least greatly conceived. 
 
 « "Thou, Earth, this night wast also constant found, 
 And breathest, newly quickened, at my feet, 
 Already with delight encircling me. 
 Thou wak'st and stir'st in me a strong resolve — 
 Towards highest being onwards still to strive." 
 
122 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 Assuming for a moment that this world-predomi- 
 nance is possible to Germany, what is the testi- 
 mony of Germany's past to her capacity to play 
 this r61e? You find Germany an empire already 
 in the seventh century, if you regard Charlemagne 
 as a German — as he was; and again you have 
 attempts at imperialism made by the German 
 race under the Ottos in the tenth century; but 
 most distinctly is Germany an imperial power 
 in the twelfth century, in the time of the Hohen- 
 staufen, one of the most tragic dynasties in history. 
 She then has Italy as her appanage; and her 
 record there, under Frederick I, Henry VI, and 
 Frederick II, is the record in Ireland of England 
 at her worst. 
 
 Again, the history of Germany as an imperial 
 power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
 centres in the records of the Habsburgs in Italy; 
 and it is impossible not to observe that the presence 
 of the Habsburgs, of the Germans, as an imperial 
 power in Italy, is synchronous with the defeat 
 and obliteration of Italian art, Italian literature, 
 Italian religion, and Italian patriotism. And in 
 the nineteenth century Germany's power in Italy 
 centres in the name of Metternich, that minister 
 who stands in the annals of European history as 
 the synonym of reaction and oppression, the man 
 who employed the dungeon and the fortress as the 
 chief instruments of an enlightened government! 
 
 Here, then, is the augury that the past affords 
 
GERMAN IMPERIALISM 123 
 
 as to the future of Germany as a world-civilizing 
 power. Here we have the record of the past — I 
 stress the word. 
 
 But, it is argued, this is not the true Germany. 
 Those attempts under the Ottos in the tenth 
 century, and in the twelfth and thirteenth under 
 the great House of Hohenstaufen, are attempts at 
 empire indeed, but the German nation as such 
 takes no part in them. German imperialism in 
 that period is, as it were, forced upon it from 
 without. The nation is indifferent to empire. 
 The true impulse of the people is to be found in 
 the Free Cities, for instance in the Hansa League. 
 And the passing away of those early efforts is 
 succeeded by a period of purely dynastic efforts 
 at empire in Germany, in which the nation becomes 
 divorced entirely from the action of the governing 
 House, the House of Habsburg. So that, until 
 the present time, until, as Treitschke admirably 
 points out, the Hohenzollern became the para- 
 moimt power in Germany, there has been no 
 national attempt at empire at all. The true 
 German genius, Treitschke himself affirms, only 
 finds its expression under the domination of 
 Prussia and of the Hohenzollern. The beginnings 
 of German imperialism, that is to say, are to be 
 found only in the Germany of the last hundred 
 years imder that glorious House ! 
 
 Germany's past as a world-civilizing power does 
 not concern the German thinkers of to-day. 
 
124 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 "We give the past," they say, ''to England. 
 When we speak of empire the empire we mean is 
 in the future. You have drunk the wine of 
 empire. It is Germany's turn now. And it is 
 vain to look back to the Hohenstaufen and to the 
 Habsburgs in Italy. Just as it would be vain to 
 appeal to England's conduct in Ireland in the 
 fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for the augury 
 of England's conduct as an empire in India under 
 Cornwallis and Wellesley, Dalhousie and Canning, 
 so it is vain to appeal to the past of Germany in 
 Italy for any augury of the character of the empire 
 that shall arise in the future out of Germany." 
 
 Treitschke has defined the aim of Germany, 
 and Treitschke's definition, which has been taken 
 up by his disciples, is this : That just as the great- 
 ness of Germany is to be found in the governance 
 of Germany by Prussia, so the greatness and good 
 of the world is to be found in the predominance 
 there of German culture, of the German mind — 
 in a word, of the German character. This is the 
 ideal of Germany, and this is Germany's rdle as 
 Treitschke saw it in the future. 
 
 For, observe, this world-dominion of which 
 Germany dreams is not simply a material do- 
 minion. Germany is not blind to the lessons 
 inculcated by the Napoleonic tyranny. Force 
 alone, violence or brute strength, by its mere 
 silent presence or by its loud manifestation in 
 war, may be necessary to establish this dominion; 
 
ESTABLISHMENT OF A WORLD-EMPIRE 125 
 
 but its ends are spirituaL The triumph of the 
 Empire will be the triumph of German culture, 
 of the German world-vision in all the phases and 
 departments of human life and energy, in religion, 
 poetry, science, art, poHtics, and social endeavour. 
 The characteristics of this German world- vision, 
 the benefits which its predominance is likely to 
 confer upon mankind, are, a German would allege, 
 truth instead of falsehood in the deepest and 
 gravest preoccupations of the human mind; Ger- 
 man sincerity instead of British hypocrisy; Faust 
 instead of Tartuffe. And whenever I have put 
 to any of the adherents of this ideal the further 
 question: "Where in actual German history do 
 you find your guarantee for the character of this 
 spiritual empire; is not the true role of Germany 
 cosmopolitan and peaceful; are not Herder and 
 Goethe its prophets?" I have met with one 
 invariable answer: "The political history of 
 Germany, from the accession of Frederick in 1740 
 to the present hour, has admittedly no meaning 
 imless it be regarded as a movement towards the 
 establishment of a world-empire, with the war 
 against England as the necessary preliminary. 
 Similarly the curve which, during the last century 
 and a half, Germany has traced in religion and 
 metaphysical thought, from Kant and Hegel to 
 Schopenhauer, Strauss, and Nietzsche, has not 
 less visibly been a movement towards a newer 
 world-religion, a newer world-faith. That fatal 
 
126 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 tendency to cosmopolitanism, to a dream-world, 
 which Heine derided^ and Treitschke deplores, 
 does, indeed, still remain, but how transfigured!'* 
 But what definitely is to be Germany's part in 
 the future of human thought? Germany answers: 
 ''It is reserved for us to resume in thought that 
 creative role in religion which the whole Teutonic 
 race abandoned fourteen centuries ago. Judaea 
 and Galilee cast their dreary spell over Greece and 
 Rome when Greece and Rome were already sinking 
 into decrepitude and the creative power in them 
 was exhausted, when weariness and bitterness 
 wakened with their greatest spirits at day and 
 sank to sleep again with them at night. But 
 Judaea and Galilee struck Germany in the splen- 
 dour and heroism of her prime. Germany and 
 the whole Teutonic people in the fifth century 
 made the great error. They conquered Rome, 
 but, dazzled by Rome's authority, they adopted 
 the religion and the culture of the vanquished. 
 Germany's own deep religious instinct, her native 
 genius for religion, manifested in her creative 
 success,^ was arrested, stunted, thwarted. But, 
 
 * "Sohn der Thorheit! traume immer, 
 Wenn dirs Herz im Busen schwillt; 
 Doch im Leben suche nimmer 
 Deines Traumes Ebenbild!" 
 
 (Werke, Elster's ed., vol. ii., p. 159.) 
 ^ Gothic architecture, the abbeys and cathedrals from Burgos 
 to Chartres and Koln, are the living witnesses to the Teuton's 
 imagination in the new religion. 
 
GERMANY'S PART IN HUMAN THOUGHT 127 
 
 having once adopted the new faith, she strove to 
 live that faith, and for more than thirty generations 
 she has struggled and wrestled to see with eyes 
 that were not her eyes, to worship a God that was 
 not her God, to live with a world- vision that was 
 not her vision, and to strive for a heaven that 
 was not her heaven. And with what chivalry and 
 with what loyalty did not Germany strive ! With 
 what ardour she flung herself first into the pursuit 
 of sainthood as an ideal and then into the Crusades ! 
 Conrad and Barbarossa, Otto the Great and 
 Frederick II, Hildebrand and Innocent III, were 
 of her blood, so were Godfrey and Tancred and 
 Bohemund. Yet in the East, in the very height 
 of her enthusiasm, the outward fabric of faith 
 sank. In the East where she sought the grave of 
 Christ she saw beyond it the grave of Balder, and 
 higher than the New Jerusalem the shining walls 
 of Asgard and of Valhalla. In Jerusalem, stand- 
 ing beside an empty grave, the summits of a 
 mightier vision gleamed spectral around her. 
 And whilst her Crusaders, front to front with 
 Islam, burst into passionate denials and set 
 Mohammed above Christ, or in exasperated scorn 
 derided all religion, her great thinkers and mystics 
 led her steadily toward the serener heights where 
 knowledge and faith dissolve in vision, and ardour 
 is all. 
 
 "A great hope had sunk; a mightier hope had 
 arisen. But, like the purposes of the world- 
 
128 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 spirit in everiasting self -disaccord, this hope could 
 only be bom in the bloodiest strife, and agony 
 infinite, and fertilizing hatred and war. This is 
 the true import of that long conflict which begins 
 with the Schmalkaldic League and only ends on 
 the battlefields of Tilly and Wallenstein, Gustavus 
 Adolphus, Bemhard of Saxe Weimar and Torsten- 
 sen. Rome no longer a guide, Germany was torn 
 by the violence of furious heresies, from which 
 sprang the wild secret orgies of the Black Mass, 
 and that subterranean literature of which the 
 * De Tribus Impostoribus * is a sign. 
 
 ^'The seventeenth century flung off Rome; the 
 eighteenth imdermined Galilee itself; Strauss 
 completed the task that Eichhom began ; and with 
 the opening of the twentieth century, Germany, her 
 long travail past, is re-united to her pristine genius, 
 her creative power in religion and in thought. 
 
 "And what is the religion which, on the whole, 
 may be characterized as the religion of the most 
 earnest and passionate minds of young Germany? 
 What is this new movement? The movement, the 
 governing idea of the centuries from the four- 
 teenth to the nineteenth, is the wrestle of the 
 German intellect not only against Rome, but 
 against Christianism itself. Must Germany sub- 
 mit to this alien creed derived from an alien 
 clime? Must she for ever confront the ages the 
 borrower of her religion, her own genius for 
 religion numbed and paralyzed? 
 
THE NEW MOVEMENT 129 
 
 *' Hence the significance of Nietzsche. Kant 
 compromises, timid and old; Hegel finds the 
 Absolute Religion in Christianity; Schopenhauer 
 turns to the East and at thirty-one adapts the 
 Upanishads to the Western mind ; David Friedrich 
 Strauss, whilst denying and rejecting the meta- 
 physic of Christianity, clings to the ethics. But 
 Nietzsche? Nietzsche clears away the 'accumu- 
 lated rubbish ' of twelve hundred years ; he attempts 
 to set the German imagination back where it 
 was with Alaric and Theodoric, fortified by the 
 experience of twelve centuries to confront the 
 darkness unaided, unappalled, triumphant, great 
 and free. 
 
 ** Thus, while preparing to found a world-empire, 
 Germany is also preparing to create a world- 
 religion. No cultured European nation since the 
 French Revolution has made any experiment in 
 creative religion. The experiment which England, 
 with her dull imagination, has recoiled from, 
 Germany will make ; the fated task which England 
 has declined, she will essay.'* 
 
 That is the faith of young Germany in 191 3. 
 The prevalent bent of mind at the universities, 
 in the army amongst the more cultured, is towards 
 what may be described as the religion of Valour, 
 reinterpreted by Napoleon and by Nietzsche — 
 the glory of action, heroism, the doing of great 
 things. It is in metaphysics Zarathustra's "Amor 
 Fati." It is in politics and ethics Napoleonism. 
 
I30 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 These same yoiing men, who, in this very month, 
 thrill with the scenes of 1813, see in Napoleon 
 the oppressor, but they see in Napoleon's creed 
 the springs of his action, a message of fire: Live 
 dangerously ! 
 
 Kant's great Imperative was born of the defeats 
 and of the victories of Frederick; echoes from 
 Kolin and Kunersdorf, as well as from Rossbach, 
 thrid along its majestic phrasing; it is moulded 
 in heroic suffering and brought forth in resignation 
 and in grief that is overcome. But in the newer 
 Imperative ring the accents of an earlier, greater 
 prime, the accents heard by the Scamander, which 
 even at Chaeronea did not entirely die away : 
 
 "Ye have heard how in old times it was said, 
 Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the 
 earth; but I say unto you. Blessed are the valiant, 
 for they shall make the earth their throne. And 
 ye have heard men say. Blessed are the poor in 
 spirit; but I say unto you, Blessed are the great 
 in soul and the free in spirit, for they shall enter 
 into Valhalla. And ye have heard men say, 
 Blessed are the peacemakers; but I say unto you, 
 Blessed are the war-makers, for they shall be 
 called, if not the children of Jahve, the children 
 of Odin, who is greater than Jahve.'* 
 
 IV 
 
 The influence which Napoleon exercises upon 
 modern German thought is peculiar and instruc- 
 
INFLUENCE OF NAPOLEON 131 
 
 tive. In Europe as a whole, in the twentieth cen- 
 tury, two great spirit-forces contend for men's 
 allegiance — Napoleon and Christ. The one, the 
 representative of life-renunciation, places the 
 reconciliation of life's discords and the solution 
 of its problems in a tranquil but nebulous region 
 beyond the grave ; the other, the asserter of earth 
 and of earth's glories, disregardful of any life 
 beyond the grave, finds life's supreme end in 
 heroism and the doing of great things, and seeks 
 no immortality except the immortality of renown, 
 and even of that he is slightly contemptuous. 
 To Napoleon the end of life is power and the 
 imposing of his will upon the wills of other men. 
 Like Achilles or like Ajax, ever to be the first and 
 to outshine all others is his confessed ambition. 
 The law, on the other hand, which Christ laid 
 upon men appears to be the law of self-effacement. 
 The true Christist toils but for others; he prays 
 but for others. He suffers for them; he dies for 
 them; Serviis servorum Dei — slave of the slaves 
 of God — was the proud subscription which the 
 haughtiest of the mediaeval Pontiffs placed at the 
 end of their letters. 
 
 In Europe, I say, this conflict between Christ 
 and Napoleon for the mastery over the minds of 
 men is the most significant spiritual phenomenon 
 of the twentieth century. You meet with it in 
 England and in America, as in Austria and Spain. 
 You meet with it even in Italy. In Russia Tolstoi's 
 
132 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 furious attacks are a proof of its increasing sway. 
 The new spirit in France is its unacknowledged 
 derivative. But it is in Germany alone that as 
 yet Napoleonism has acquired something of the 
 clearness and self-consistency of a formulated 
 creed, above all in Berlin and in the cities and 
 towns that come most within the influence of 
 Berlin. They have not forgotten 1806 and the 
 years of hideous humiliation which followed; they 
 have not forgotten the German conscripts who 
 were compelled to fight under the banners of their 
 conqueror; they have not forgotten the 297,000 
 men of German blood, who under the Corsican's 
 leadership, had, in 1812, to march against Russia; 
 nor have they forgotten 18 13 and the tremulous 
 awful hour when the destinies of Europe and, so 
 to speak, of the world, hung in the balance at 
 Dresden, at Kulm, at Katzbach and at Leipzig. 
 But, whilst abjuring the tyrant of Germany and 
 the oppressor of Europe, they have gradually 
 acquired a profound and ever profounder rever- 
 ence for the creed and the religion towards which 
 that great and solitary spirit, perhaps the loneliest 
 amongst the children of men, still struggled amid 
 the tumults and desolations, the triumphs and 
 the glories, the victory and the disaster of his 
 tragic and brief career — a world-tragedy, his, at 
 once the Man of Destiny and the Antagonist of 
 Destiny. 
 
 More than the Europe of 1800 and 1801, which 
 
CORSICA HAS CONQUERED GALILEE 133 
 
 saw in the victor of Marengo the Mohammed of a 
 new era, the enunciator of a new faith, young Ger- 
 many, the Germany of to-day, in the writings of 
 Treitschke and of the followers of Treitschke, 
 studies Napoleonism, illumining politics with an 
 austere and uplifting grandeur. In the writings of 
 Nietzsche and of the followers of Nietzsche they 
 study the same Napoleonism transforming the 
 principles of everyday life, breathing a new 
 spirit into ethics, transfiguring the tedious, half- 
 hypocritical morality of an earlier generation. 
 Remorse for the great error of the race in the fifth 
 century has ousted every other admiration. 
 
 Corsica, in a word, has conquered Galilee. 
 
 And the future? All there is as yet obscure ; but 
 that ''empire of the spirit" will certainly be some- 
 thing of wider range, of indefinitely wider range 
 than the whole of the confederated German world, 
 or any idealization of that world, however up- 
 lifted or sublime. One mighty issue is secured: 
 Germany at least shall not confront the twentieth 
 century and its thronging vicissitudes as the 
 worshipper of an alien God, thrall of an alien 
 morality. Dazzling as Elpore^ with the dawn-star 
 above her brow, the New Germany, knit once 
 more to the divine genius within herself, delivered 
 from the loathed burden of the past, the cancer of 
 the centuries, confronts the vast darkness. 
 
 The role of a new Judasa or a new Hellas is lofty 
 
 » See Goethe's " Pandora:' 
 
134 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 enough to stimulate the imagination and give an 
 inspiration to the monotony of contemporary Hfe. 
 But this changed and changing Europe of ours, 
 this changed and changing world, does it definitely 
 forbid or nobly encourage that hope? Do the 
 present conditions of the world permit of a new 
 Judffia or a new Hellas? 
 
 History, I have somewhere said, never really 
 repeats itself — except in the leading articles of 
 newspapers! But in the years in front, ineffec- 
 tively and impotently crowded by Nietzsche with 
 his ambiguous caricature, the Superman, a thing 
 made by Nature's journeyman — in that future 
 what newer path to a newer world-vision, what 
 creative, all-informing, all-comprehensive thought 
 which shall extort a reluctant homage even from 
 the East, may not the German imagination, its 
 fetters broken, now carve? Till now all has been 
 negative. Chaos has returned; but out of that 
 chaos what new and miraculous cosmos may not 
 the German imagination raise? 
 
 That world-empire of which Germany dreams 
 she may, or may not, on its material side, attain; 
 but in this race for the spirit's dominion, the 
 mightier empire of human Thought, who is her 
 rival? Where even is her competitor? Not 
 England assuredly; for in that region England in 
 the twentieth century has a place retrograde 
 almost as Austria or Spain; not America; not 
 Russia; not Japan, with her tasteless, over-eager 
 
BRITISH IMPERIALISM 135 
 
 efforts to enter the comity of Europe. Is it 
 France? . . . 
 
 [The discussion of this question was here broken off as 
 the lecture hour was nearing its end; and it is not 
 possible to fill the gap from any notes left by the 
 lecturer. The ^^ ambitions'' spoken of in the first 
 sentence of Section V are clearly those of world- 
 empire ^'on its material side, "] 
 
 V 
 
 If these, then, are the legitimate impulses, the just 
 ambitions of Germany — and what Englishman 
 remembering the methods by which the British 
 Empire has been established in India, in America, 
 in Africa, in Egypt, dare arraign those impulses or 
 those ambitions? — if these are the modes which the 
 **wiU to power" assumes in modern Germany, 
 what of England and those needs of England with 
 which they enter most immediately into collision? 
 
 And here it is necessary, as a preliminary, to 
 consider the purpose of British Imperialism at the 
 present day and the manner in which that purpose 
 has been evolved; to consider what the past of 
 England and of this empire of ours has been, what 
 has been the ideal shaped in that past and what it is 
 that has made the greatness of England. 
 
 Now assuredly there was never a period in our 
 history when it was more essential than at the pres- 
 
136 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 ent that every Englishman should have some clear 
 conception of what the words "Empire" and 
 "Imperialism" really mean, what they have 
 meant in the past. Yet there has never been a 
 period in which those words were employed more 
 vaguely or more variously; and vague words lead 
 to vague actions. England in the twentieth 
 century has reached that transition stage in the 
 history of all empires when more or less uncon- 
 scious effort passes into conscious realization and 
 achievement. We are passing, that is to say, from 
 the period when we created this empire almost 
 without knowing it, to a period in which all the 
 latent purposes of our history have emerged into 
 the full survey of everyday criticism, everyday com- 
 ment. This consciousness or over-consciousness 
 of empire is a new phase in the political life of 
 England and is of momentous significance. The 
 mind of the race, absorbed no longer in the onward 
 striving, dwells persistently, at times morbidly, on 
 its present greatness, or, turning backward, re- 
 interprets the past by the light of the present, and 
 in nearer or remoter actions and eras discovers 
 purposes which were unsuspected alike by the 
 heroes of those actions and by their contempo- 
 raries, but which led inevitably to the present. 
 
 In Roman history the age of Augustus offers the 
 most exact analogy to the twentieth century in the 
 history of Imperial Britain. Montesquieu, survey- 
 ing the work of the early kings of Rome, clinches 
 
ENGLAND'S POSITION TO-DAY 137 
 
 the survey in the fine and telling phrase: "They 
 had already begun to build the eternal city. ** But 
 even Livy, writing his History under the dominion 
 of a single thought, is too much of an historian, 
 amid all his rhetoric, to ascribe to any Roman 
 politician or to any Roman orator before the time 
 of Sulla so terse and conscious an interpretation of 
 Rome*s mission as that which Virgil has placed in 
 the mouth of Anchises: 
 
 *'Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera, 
 credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore vultus, 
 orabunt causas melius, coelique meatus 
 describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent : 
 tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento; 
 hse tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem, 
 parcere subjectis et debellare superbos."^ 
 
 There are other points of resemblance. Britain's 
 concession of practical autonomy to South Africa, 
 before the traces of war had vanished from farm 
 and veldt, extorted the admiration of Europe ; but 
 it has its parallel on an even greater scale in Caesar's 
 grant of the franchise to the Gauls and in his 
 formation of the Gaulic legions. 
 
 * " Others, I know it well, the breathing bronze shall chase, 
 And from the death-cold marble upcall the living face, 
 Shall plead with eloquence not thine, shall mete and map 
 
 the skies. 
 And with the voice of science tell when stars shall set 
 
 and rise: 
 Be thine, O Rome, to rule; nor e'er this destiny forgo. 
 To spare who yield submission, and bring the haughty low." 
 
138 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 Is it possible, then, at such a transition period as 
 the present, which, just because it is a transition 
 period, is therefore as dangerous to a nation as is a 
 flank-march to an army — is it possible to form any- 
 clear conception of what ** Empire" has really 
 always meant to England, whether in extreme con- 
 sciousness or in the dark unconscious? Can one 
 define with any precision the aims which British 
 Imperialism has unconsciously pursued in the past, 
 and the ends which it more or less consciously pur- 
 sues in the present? 
 
 Let me illustrate my answer by an incident from 
 Greek history. ^ On the night before Alexander of 
 Macedon started for the East on that career of 
 conquest in which, like Achilles, his great exemplar, 
 he was to find his glory and an early death, he had 
 a farewell interview with the man who had been 
 his tutor, now the master of a rising school of 
 thought in the shades of the Lyceum. And to- 
 wards the close of the interview Aristotle said to 
 the Macedonian : 
 
 "You are about to start upon an enterprise 
 which will bring you into many lands and amongst 
 many nations, some already celebrated in arts and 
 arms, some savage and unknown. But this last 
 counsel I give you: Whithersoever your victories 
 
 ^ [Note. — The authority for this incident in its present form can- 
 not he traced; hut as Professor Cramh used it hoth in his writings and 
 lectures it is probable that, in his exceptionally wide studies in classic 
 cal literature, he had come across it in some little-known author.] 
 
AIM OF BRITISH IMPERIALISM 139 
 
 lead you, never forget that you are a Greek, and 
 everywhere draw hard and fast the Hne that 
 separates the Greek from the Barbarian." 
 
 ^'No, " answered the youthful conqueror — he 
 was barely two-and- twenty — ''I will pursue an- 
 other policy. I will make all men Hellenes. That 
 shall be the purpose of my victories. " 
 
 The wisdom of a soldier for once went deeper 
 than the wisdom of the greatest architect of 
 thought that Time has known. 
 
 And two centuries later a Greek writer gave 
 definiteness to the Macedonian's reply when he 
 described the influence of the Greek spirit under the 
 Roman dominion as tending to give all men a 
 Greek mind, to give all men the power to look at 
 man's life, man's actions, man's past and future, 
 from the standpoint of the Greek. 
 
 In the same manner, if I were asked how one 
 could describe in a sentence the general aim of 
 British Imperialism during the last two centuries 
 and a half, I should answer in the spirit of Dionys- 
 ius : To give all men within its bounds an English 
 mind; to give all who come within its sway the 
 power to look at the things of man's life, at the 
 past, at the future, from the standpoint of an 
 Englishman ; to diffuse within its boimds that high 
 tolerance in religion which has marked this empire 
 from its foundation; that reverence yet boldness 
 before the mysteriousness of life and death, 
 characteristic of our great poets and our great 
 
140 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 thinkers; that love of free institutions, that pursuit 
 of an ever-higher justice and a larger freedom 
 which, rightly or wrongly, we associate with the 
 temper and character of our race wherever it is 
 dominant and secure.^ 
 
 That is the conception of Empire and of England 
 which persists through the changing fortunes of 
 parties and the rise and fall of Cabinets. It out- 
 lives the generations. Like an immortal energy it 
 links age to age. This undying spirit is the true 
 England, the true Britain, for which men strive 
 and suffer in every zone and in every era, which 
 silently controls their actions and shapes their 
 character like an inward fate — "England." It is 
 this which gives hope in hopeless times, imparting 
 
 ^ If finally 1 were asked when this conception of empire began 
 to take imaginative possession of the mind of a great statesman, 
 I should point, perhaps arbitrarily, to Cromwell. And I should 
 further point to Edmund Burke's great impeachment of Warren 
 Hastings in 1788 as the period when, from being the possession of 
 statesmen, it becomes the possession of the nation, shaping its 
 counsels henceforth. For, if Burke is a reactionary in constitu- 
 tional politics, in his impeachment of Hastings he is the prophet 
 of a new era, the enunciator of an ideal which the later nineteenth 
 century slowly endeavours to realize — an empire resting, not on 
 violence, but on justice and freedom. That impeachment antici- 
 pates our present policy in India and in Egypt, just as Burke's 
 speeches on the American Colonies anticipate the policy which 
 underlies our treatment of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and 
 South Africa at the present day, a policy which has almost 
 reversed an article of faith in the eighteenth century — that every 
 colony must, in the long run, like ripe fruit, detach itself from 
 the parent stem. 
 
THE SPIRIT-PURPOSE 141 
 
 its immortal vigour to the statesman in his cabinet 
 and to the soldier in the field. A government or a 
 minister may seem to have the power arbitrarily 
 to provoke a war which involves the suffering and 
 deaths of thousands; but it is neither for govern- 
 ment nor minister that the soldier falls. Lying 
 there in agony, sinking into darkness, he has in 
 himself the consciousness of this far greater thing, 
 this mysterious, deathless, onward-striving force, 
 call it God, call it Destiny — but name it England. 
 For England it is. It is for this that on the bat- 
 tlefield the soldier fights, in victory or in defeat. 
 This is the spirit-purpose which binds century to 
 century, making the yeoman who fought to estab- 
 lish an empire on the fields of France the comrades 
 in purpose of the mariners who founded Virginia, 
 of those adventurers to the East (themselves the 
 pioneers of the soldiers who, under Clive, Hastings, 
 Eyre Coote, Wellesley and Dalhousie, founded 
 our empire in India), or of those adventurers, 
 again, who settled in the vast loneliness of the 
 island continent of Australia. 
 
 To give all men within its bounds an English 
 mind — that has been the purpose of our empire 
 in the past. He who speaks of England's greatness 
 speaks of this. Her renown, her glory, it is this, 
 undying, imperishable, in the strictest sense of 
 that word. For if, in some cataclysm of Nature, 
 these islands and all that they embrace were over- 
 whelmed and sunk in sea-oblivion, if to-morrow's 
 
142 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 sun rose upon an Englandless world, still this spirit 
 and this purpose in other lands would fare on un- 
 touched amid the wreck. 
 
 To the German accusation cited in the opening 
 lecture that in India England has made no new ex- 
 periment in religion, it can be answered that more 
 than any other conqueror of India she has per- 
 mitted the genius of its race to continue its own 
 developments, that religious propagandism has 
 never formed part of her political creed. She has 
 even, at stated intervals, checked the inopportune 
 or intemperate zeal of missionaries of her own race. 
 And how is it thinkable that an English Shah 
 Jehan should ever arise to imperil by bigotry the 
 continuance of the British Raj? At moments, 
 indeed, this empire seems to resemble a vast temple, 
 with the vaulted skies for its dome and the viewless 
 bounds of this planet for its walls. And within 
 that temple what prayers arise, in every accent, 
 and what sound of hymns to every god that, down 
 the long centuries, the human imagination has 
 created or adored! 
 
 To give all men an English mind — that ideal has 
 been our guiding star through all the phases of our 
 empire. 
 
 " . . . Se tu segui tua stella^ 
 Non puoi fallire a glorioso porto."* 
 
 ' "If thou follow but thy star 
 
 Thou shalt not fail of a glorious haven," 
 
THE NEW IMPERIAL PROBLEM 143 
 
 And, until now, Dante's noble verse has been most 
 strangely, most greatly realized by the English. 
 Who shall affirm how long that ideal shall yet 
 govern England's actions? 
 
 VI 
 
 With the twentieth century England has reached a 
 stage in the career of empire when her policy, 
 whatever it may have been in the past, becomes 
 definitely a policy of peace, not war, of internal 
 organization, not of outward expansion. Eng- 
 land's task now, that is to say — if there were no 
 other power than England — is the evolution, not 
 of an exterior uniformity, but of an inner harmony, 
 the organization of this empire that we already 
 possess, the founding of an imperially representa- 
 tive government. New problems of every kind 
 arising from within her own bounds are pressing 
 for solution, in India, in Egypt, in Canada and in 
 the Southern Seas. How is the central government 
 of this vast and complex structure of empire ul- 
 timately to be organized? Who are to compose 
 the Imperial Council or the Imperial Parliament? 
 Upon what principle are its members to be elected, 
 and from whom, and by whom? It seems as if 
 the political genius of the nation or the empire 
 were to be strained to create not only a new school 
 of statesmen, but almost a new statesmanship. 
 The problem of armaments, due to the transforma- 
 
144 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 tion which the art of war is undergoing, is not less 
 pressing. If free communities, Canada, Australia, 
 New Zealand, South Africa, create their own 
 armies and build their own fleets, who is to have 
 the supreme command of those armies; in what 
 docks are those fleets to be built; by whom are 
 they to be manned; and what is to be the part of 
 each separate State or unit of government in their 
 control? Is it conceivable, if those very principles 
 which have made England an empire are to persist 
 — the larger freedom, the higher justice — is it 
 conceivable that these organized countries, these 
 States already numbering some fifteen or sixteen 
 million inhabitants, will be content to supply the 
 means of peace and war and yet have no voice 
 whatever in the decision of peace and war? It is 
 absolutely inconceivable. And, again, there is 
 that wider and still more intricate problem of 
 India. How and by what stretch of the imagina- 
 tion is that freedom and justice, in any conscious 
 or self-governing sense, to be extended to India? 
 And to that problem you can also add the like 
 problem in Egypt. These are merely the central 
 strands of a complex ganglion of questions which, 
 with every year and every decade, will become 
 more pressing. 
 
 Freedom a French thinker once defined as the 
 power to exercise the will in the pursuit of its 
 highest ends without fear. For this alone gives to 
 the mind that tranquillity, that "security," in the 
 
"FRIENDLY RIVALRY" 145 
 
 strict sense of the word — immunity from cares — 
 necessary to free operations of the great faculties 
 of the mind. And it is this tranquillity, this se- 
 curity, that is now above all things necessary to 
 England. But it is just this tranquillity, this 
 security, which she cannot find. For whilst Eng- 
 land may pray for peace in order to shape out these 
 problems in politics, there still beyond the North 
 Sea is the stern Watcher, unsleeping, unresting, 
 bound to her own fate, pursuing her own distant 
 goal undeviatingly, unfalteringly, weighing every 
 action of England, waiting for every sign of 
 England's weakness. It is here that Germany's 
 will to power comes into tragic conflict with 
 England's will to peace. Here is the element of 
 discord — it is not in England herself. What will 
 be the issue? 
 
 There the question lies, and it is a difficult 
 question — more difficult for a German than for an 
 Englishman. To talk about ''friendly rivalry" is 
 no answer. I never can understand what meaning 
 that kind of talk has — "friendly rivalry," "gener- 
 ous emulation, " and the image of racers on a race- 
 course. Even if such a thing were possible or 
 thinkable among nations — and there is no example 
 in history of any such "friendly rivalry," of any 
 such "generous emulation" — but even if it were 
 possible, what is to be the state of mind of a young 
 and ardent German at the present day who feels 
 within his nation very nearly an imhmited power, 
 
 zo 
 
146 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 and who sees only one great adversary, one great 
 obstacle, between him and the realization of the 
 world-ideal of his race? There are tens of thou- 
 sands of such young Germans. What are you or I 
 to think of them if they sit still and fold their 
 hands — in ''friendly rivalry," in "generous emula- 
 tion" of England, a Power which is described to 
 them by their leaders and thinkers as already 
 tottering to its grave? What other spirit is to 
 arise within them than the spirit which I have 
 indicated in these lectures? 
 
 I have lived amongst Germans and know some- 
 thing of the temper of Germany's manhood and of 
 her youth. I have read much in her history and in 
 her literature. I have been impressed, as with the 
 motion of tides and of great rivers, by the majesty 
 of that movement by which, from the days of the 
 Saxon and the Hohenstaufen Emperors, through 
 centuries of feudal anarchy and disintegration 
 made still more disintegrated by the convulsive 
 forces of the fiercest religious strife, she has at- 
 tained to her position to-day; and with the best 
 will in the world I can see no issue to the present 
 collision of ideals but a tragic issue. England, 
 indeed, desires peace ; England, indeed, it is certain, 
 will never make war upon Germany; but how is 
 the youth of Germany, the youth of that nation 
 great in arts as in war, to acquiesce in the world- 
 predominance of England? With what thoughts 
 are they to read the history and the literature 
 
VALUE OF ALLIANCES 147 
 
 of their country? If, from love of peace or dread 
 of war, Germany submits, it would seem as if her 
 great soldiers had fought in vain, as if the long 
 roll of her battles had passed like an empty sound, 
 as if the Great Elector and Frederick, Stein and 
 Scharnhorst and Bismarck had schemed in vain, 
 as if her thinkers had thought their thoughts and 
 her poets had dreamed their dreams not less in 
 vain. But if, on the other hand, Germany has 
 not declined from her ancient valour the issue is 
 certain, and a speedy issue. 
 
 It is war. 
 
 At the present stage of world-history it is, of 
 course, useless to seek a practical policy in arbitra- 
 tion. It would be a waste of words even to demon- 
 strate the invalidity of this device. Nor would it 
 be more opportune to discuss the value of alliances 
 as a permanent means of securing the peace of 
 Europe. In a treaty with an enemy that treaty 
 is binding only so long as you can make your\ 
 enemy see gleam behind the parchment the point 1 
 of a sword ; and the verdict of history upon alliances 
 is unmistakable and explicit. Whatever principle 
 may govern individual friendships, alliances be- 
 tween nations and States are governed by self- 
 interest only ; they are valid only so long as mutual 
 fears or mutual desires persist in equal force. For 
 the friendship of nations is an empty name ; peace 
 is at best a truce on the battlefield of Time; the 
 old myth or the old history of the struggle for 
 
148 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 existence is behind us, but the struggle for power 
 — who is to assign bounds to its empire, or invent 
 an instrument for measuring its intensity? 
 
 In this country we seem to be gradually acquir- 
 ing the dangerous habit of mind of trusting to 
 alliances rather than to our own strength. A great 
 nation trusts to itself mainly; only secondarily to 
 alliances, however intimate. For deep in the heart 
 of every nation lie ancient, strong resentments, 
 resentments that at a moment of crisis may flare 
 up into ancient strifes. War has often revealed 
 antagonisms between powers apparently friendly, 
 and sympathies between powers apparently hostile. 
 We speak much, for instance, of the Triple En- 
 tente; but of how long standing is our amity with 
 France, and upon what foundations does it rest? 
 Waterloo is not yet a century old, and Fashoda is 
 but yesterday; and some half a century ago, be- 
 tween these two terms, the ignoble terror of a 
 French invasion created the absurd Volunteer 
 System which a not less ignoble terror of Germany 
 has recently transformed into the still more ab- 
 surd Territorial Force. And Russia? At the 
 present hour Germany seems in a state of dull 
 hostility towards Russia, England in a state of 
 very dull friendship with the same power. Eng- 
 land, with her ancient dreams, her ancient tradi- 
 tions and ideals of the higher freedom, the larger 
 justice, summons the aid of Russia to help her to 
 govern, or misgovern, Persia! How can we hope 
 
WAR OR SUBMISSION 149 
 
 that such an alliance, so unnaturally framed, will 
 last? Does it not contain within itself the very- 
 seeds of its own destruction? And along the 
 northern shore of the Persian Gulf or on the 
 Afghan frontier we have with our own hands laid 
 a mine which might at any moment shatter the 
 fabric to pieces. He who cannot take within his 
 range a prostrate France and the alliance of Russia 
 and Germany against England is not a student of 
 politics, whatever else he may be. 
 
 There is possible perhaps for England another 
 course than the arbitrament of war. Avoiding war 
 and tacitly acquiescing in the role of submission, 
 England may adopt a policy of concession to an 
 enemy whom she dreads, and, one diplomatic 
 defeat leading to another, she may gradually sink 
 to a secondary place in the councils of Europe and 
 of the world. In such a process there need be 
 nothing that is crudely disgraceful, nothing to 
 sting to the quick the honour of opportunist 
 Cabinets or publicists. The concessions would be 
 made at moderately wide intervals, and a people 
 sunk of itself in torpor and indifference can easily 
 be lulled by the ministerial management of words 
 and events. Everyday life would go on as before; 
 strikes would increase in number and the pillage 
 of capital be accelerated; sloth would settle ever 
 deeper on every class, and, as in the Byzantium of 
 the thirteenth century, the vanity of a decrepit 
 people would exhibit itself in complacent ostenta- 
 
150 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 tion. Thus indeed the fate of England would 
 resemble the fate of Venice in the sixteenth cen- 
 tury, until some soldier, more cynical or more 
 brutal in his ambition, would affix a term to her 
 sham independence, as at Campo Formio Napoleon 
 ended the sham independence of Venice. 
 
 But is the creative power which has shaped this 
 ancient and famous empire really dead? Is it 
 moribund, or sick at all, within us? Or is this 
 momentary apathy and indifference a thing indeed 
 momentary, that shall pass away? 
 
 Even now, even in 19 13, when I consider Eng- 
 land and this vast and complex fabric of empire 
 which she has slowly reared, its colonies, its de- 
 pendencies, the cosmic energy which everywhere 
 seems to animate the mass in its united life and in 
 its separate States or principalities, all such com- 
 parisons with decaying empires appear an irrele- 
 vance or a futility. Whatever be England's fate, 
 it will not be the fate of Venice or Byzantium. 
 And as a proof of the validity of this impression or 
 this conviction I seem to discover everywhere 
 stirrings as of a new life, to hear the tramp of 
 armies fired by a newer chivalry than that of Cregy, 
 and on the horizon to discern the outline of fleets 
 manned by as heroic a resolve as were those of 
 Nelson or Rodney. 
 
 England till now has known nothing of her 
 danger. Democratic England has known nothing 
 of war. The full enfranchisement of the English 
 
HOPE AND DEMOCRACY 151 
 
 nation dates only from 1867 and 1885, and since 
 1867 what danger or what war upon a large scale 
 has the enfranchised democracy experienced? But 
 will not the democracy gradually understand that 
 its own power and its own privileges depend upon 
 the extent to which it takes upon itself not only 
 the rights but the duties and responsibilities of 
 those who have preceded it in the government of 
 these islands ; of the feudal barons who not merely 
 fronted King John at Runnymede but led the 
 charge on the fields of France from Cregy to 
 Castillon; of the merchant-class who, in the six- 
 teenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, 
 rivalling in enterprise and daring the feudal 
 leaders of an earlier time, outlined the wide bounds 
 of our empire in the sunrise and in the sunset? . . . 
 
 [Note. — The paragraph is unfinished. The lecturer 
 must have intended to refer to the government and 
 electorate which conducted and supported the war 
 against Napoleon.] 
 
 But in this is one*s final hope: that the English 
 nation and race as a whole shall gradually perceive 
 that if the task of internal organization is ever to 
 be carried out in that tranquillity and security of 
 spirit which is necessary for all high tasks in poli- 
 tics, England must take upon herself the fulfilment 
 of her destiny, depending upon herself alone for 
 the realization of a destiny that is her destiny. 
 
 4: 4: 4: 4: 4: 
 
152 PAST AND FUTURE 
 
 [Note. — It was the author^ s intention to end the hook 
 with a fuller development of this theme of England 
 and her destiny than was possible in the lecture. 
 No notes for this intended close of the book exist 
 except the following fragment.] 
 
 And if the dire event of a war with Germany — if 
 it is a dire event — should ever occur, there shall be 
 seen upon this earth of ours a conflict which, be- 
 yond all others, will recall that description of the 
 great Greek wars: 
 
 ** Heroes in battle with heroes, 
 And above them the wrathful gods.** 
 
 And one can imagine the ancient, mighty deity of 
 all the Teutonic kindred, throned above the clouds, 
 looking serenely down upon that conflict, upon his 
 favourite children, the English and the Germans, 
 locked in a death-struggle, smiling upon the hero- 
 ism of that struggle, the heroism of the children of 
 Odin the War-god! 
 
HTHE following pages contain 
 descriptions of books dealing 
 with various phases of the different 
 countries involved in the European 
 war. They are of the most 
 timely interest and of unusual value. 
 
The German Enigma 
 
 An Inquiry Among the Germans 
 
 What They Think— What They Want 
 What They Can Do 
 
 By Georges Bordon 
 Translated by Beatrice Marshall 
 
 M. Bordon, a sub-editor of Figaro, was sent by that journal 
 to make a careful attempt "to get at Germany as she actually 
 is," and here presents his results. 
 
 " I made a great effort to shake off and cast from me all my 
 preconceived opinions . . . Among the personages I interviewed 
 were politicians, professors, military men, financiers, diplomatists, 
 artists, manufacturers, solicitors, and officials; any one, in fact, 
 who was likely to throw light on the character, temperament, 
 and moral tendencies of modern Germany." 
 
 The subject of his conversations was always the relations 
 between France and Germany; the significance of the Agadir 
 incidents; the attitude of the press and public opinion; the 
 sources of bitterness on both sides; and, above all, the signs of 
 the future. He talked in turn with von Kiderlen Waechter, the 
 Foreign Minister, Herr Kamp, President of the Reichstag, Pro- 
 fessor von Schmoller and Adolph von Wagner; with the great 
 landowners. Prince Hatzfeldt, Prince Lichnowsky; with the 
 editor, Theodor Wolff, with Herr von Sudermann, with Gen. 
 Keim, President of the Military League, and with famous states- 
 men and financiers. 
 
 And everywhere the attitude of individuals seemed to hold a 
 golden promise of a better understanding between France, 
 Britain, and Germany, natural allies against the Slav. 
 
 Cloth net, $L25 
 
 E. P. Dutton & Company 
 
 Publishers 681 5th Ave. New York 
 
Modem Germany 
 
 Her Political and Economic Problems, Her Foreign 
 
 and Domestic Policy, Her Ambitions, and tiie 
 
 Causes of Her Successes and of Her 
 
 Failures 
 
 By J. Ellis Barker 
 
 Fourth and very greatly enlarged Edition 
 
 THE fourth edition of Modern Germany is an important book 
 for two reasons: It contains over two hundred pages of 
 new matter; and it describes more definitely than did the three 
 preceding editions the points in which Germany fails. The 
 new chapters treat of Russo-German relations, the Triple Alli- 
 ance, Germany's policy toward Great Britain, the Moroccan 
 Crisis of 191 1, the Reichstag Election of 1912, and German in- 
 dustrial conditions. 
 
 The book is both readable and thorough ; nothing yet published 
 gives so adequate an idea of Germany's relations, up to the war, 
 with Russia, France, Great Britain, Austria-Hungary, and the 
 Netherlands, or so fully describes her resources, the development 
 of her industries, and the character of the world-policy which 
 men like Professor Treitschke have impressed upon the leaders 
 of this generation. 
 
 Cloth, 8vo, net, $3.00 
 
 E. P. Dutton & Company 
 
 Publishers 681 5th Ave. New York 
 
A History of Russia 
 
 By V. O. Kluchevsky 
 
 Late Professor of Russian History in the University of Moscow 
 In Three Volumes. Translated by C. J. Hogarth 
 
 THIS work covers that most important part of Russia's his- 
 tory in which she was most herself — the years before she 
 began to yield to the influence of the western nations with whom 
 she had been long in contact. For any understanding of the 
 origins of Russian institutions and of the fundamental charac- 
 teristics of her people it is indispensable, and for the later years 
 is ably supplemented by Prof. Mayor's work. Of the periods 
 covered it makes the most detailed and thorough study. It is 
 the only complete history of those times. 
 
 "One of the best historical works published in any language 
 in recent years is this history of Russia, by the late Professor 
 Kluchevsky of the University of Moscow. For this is not a 
 simple narrative of political or international happenings but a 
 remarkable study of Russian social, economic, and international 
 history based upon years of personal research in the available 
 historical sources of the subject. Instead of the conventional 
 and somewhat disconnected chronicle by Rombaud, we have 
 here a work that not only approaches the subject from a new 
 and original point of view but reveals in every chapter a famili- 
 arity with and an assimilation of the sources for Russian history 
 that compels attention and interest. . . . Prof. Kluchevsky's 
 interpretations are always ready and his generalizations on the 
 tendencies in Russian history at different periods are often 
 startling in their sweep and boldness." 
 
 From a Review in the Annals of the American Academy, 
 by William E. Lingelbach, University of Pennsylvania. 
 
 Three Volumes, Cloth, net, $7.50 
 
 E. P. Dutton & Company 
 
 Publishers 681 5th Ave. New York 
 
An Economic History 
 of Russia 
 
 By James Mavor, Ph.D. 
 
 Professor of Political Economy in the University of Toronto 
 
 " Mr. Mavor, who is Professor of Political Economy in the 
 University of Toronto, has made a careful and profound study 
 of his subject; has availed himself of every accessible source of 
 information, in the Russian language as well as in French, Ger- 
 man, and English; has had the assistance of able Russian ad- 
 visers and collaborators; and has devoted more than seven years 
 to his task. . . . 
 
 " One might read everything that is available in English, 
 from the first edition of Wallace's ' Russia ' to the articles on 
 Russia in the eleventh edition of the * Encyclopaedia Britannica,' 
 without finding anything so accurate, comprehensive, and 
 illuminating. . . . 
 
 " In view of the momentous struggle recently begun in Europe, 
 and the part that Russia must inevitably play in it, Professor 
 Mavor's book has an importance that it might not have perhaps 
 in time of peace; but in any circumstances and under any con- 
 ditions it is likely to stand for many years as the best economic 
 and political history of the Russian Empire that is accessible 
 to English readers." — From an extended review in The Outlook. 
 
 " Rarely has there been written in the English tongue a his- 
 tory of economic and political progress so dispassionate, so 
 scholarly, so just." — New York Times. 
 
 In Two 8vo volumes, $10.00 net 
 
 E. P. Dutton & Company 
 
 Publishers 681 5th Ave. New York 
 
Modem England 
 
 A Historical and Sociological Study 
 By Louis Cazamian 
 
 Lecturer at the Sorbonne 
 
 An essay in the philosophy of history, tracing a picture of 
 England of to-day by showing the main lines along which the 
 facts of her development may be grouped, and by stating the 
 most important of the problems which confront her with the reme- 
 dies which have been tried or proposed. 
 
 It is remarkable that no book by any English writer has 
 treated a subject vitally interesting to Englishmen so compre- 
 hensively and fully as it has been handled by Mens. Cazamian 
 writing for Frenchmen. 
 
 Cloth, net, $1 30 
 
 France To-Day 
 
 Its Religious Orientation 
 By Paul Sabatier 
 
 " To understand and reflect the mind of a whole people, even 
 on such a sectional aspect of it as its religion, is not an easy task. 
 But there is no man better fitted by nature and training to do 
 so than Paul Sabatier. The reader's attention is directed to the 
 book both as a means of stimulating interest in a living subject, 
 and as a means of measurably gratifying that interest." — Homi- 
 letic Review. 
 
 M. Sabatier is a Protestant of Huguenot ancestry, whose 
 studies of mediseval Catholicism have developed a broad sym- 
 pathy with all that is best in the Roman church. Add to this 
 his special studies of Modernism, and it is easy to account for 
 the unusual scope of his vision. 
 
 Clotk net, $2.00 
 
 E. P. Dutton & Company 
 
 Publishers 681 5th Ave. New York 
 
England and the Orleans 
 Monarchy 
 
 By Major John Hall 
 
 Author of "The Bourbon Restoration" 
 
 A history of the troubled years from 1830 to 1848, 
 during which Belgium was created an independent 
 state, the first entente cordiale developed between 
 England and France, and the unrest of Europe cul- 
 minated in war and revolution. 
 
 The kingdom of the Netherlands created by the 
 Congress of Vienna had never been a success, the 
 Dutch and Belgians could not agree, but the selection 
 of a sovereign for the new state was a matter vital to 
 the interests of the five Powers whose negotiations 
 Major Hall describes at length. No arrangement 
 which might in future lead to the union of Belgium 
 with either Prussia or France could be permitted by 
 England. Her memory of Bonaparte's reported de- 
 sire to possess Antwerp, "as a pistol held at England's 
 head," was still too clear. Neutral Belgitun must be, 
 even at the price of war. 
 
 Cloth, net, $4.00 
 
 E. P. Dutton & Company 
 
 Publishers 681 5th Ave. New York 
 
Common Sense in Foreign 
 
 Policy 
 
 By Sir Harry Johnston 
 
 Illustrated with Eight Maps by the Author and by Dr. J. G. Bartholomew 
 
 An indispensable book to those forecasting the coming recon- 
 struction of European affairs, since it gives, in the most concise 
 and readable form, the actual position of each of the great 
 Powers at the time the war broke out. It describes their in- 
 ternal conditions, actual colonial possessions, and territorial 
 ambitions. 
 
 ' ' Probably one of the strongest forces on the side of a nobler 
 foreign policy would be a better training of the democracies of 
 the world in the geography and history of empire, a training to 
 which this volume is a valuable contribution." — The Independent. 
 
 Cloth, net, $L25 
 
 A Literary and Historical 
 Atlas of Europe 
 
 By J. G. Bartholomew 
 
 Of the Geographical Institute, Edinburgh 
 
 q6 Pages of Colored Maps and 32 Pages of Maps in Line. Phygical, 
 Historical, and Literary. With Index and Full Gazetteer 
 
 Supplied in the four bindings of 
 
 Everyman's Library 
 
 Cloth 
 
 Bancroft do. 
 
 Red 
 
 Quarter 
 
 35 cents 
 
 reinforced 
 
 Leather 
 
 Pigskin 
 
 net 
 
 50c, net 
 
 70c. net 
 
 $1,00 net 
 
 There are no better maps than those of the famous geogra- 
 pher, J. G. Bartholomew, and the form in which they are bound 
 is especially convenient. 
 
 E. P. Dutton & Company 
 
 Publishers 681 5th Ave. New York 
 
 H 302 35 
 

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