If it is true, as already suggested, that Germany’s action has only been that of the spark that fires the magazine, still her part in the affair affords such an extraordinarily illuminating text and illustration that one may be excused for dwelling on it.

Here, in her case, we have the divisions of a nation’s life set out in well-marked fashion.  We have a military clique headed by a personal and sadly irresponsible ruler; we have a vulgar and much swollen commercial class; and then, besides these two, we have a huge ant’s nest of professors and students, a large population of intelligent and well-trained factory workers, and a vast residuum of peasants.  Thus we have at least five distinct classes, but of these the last three have—­till thirty or forty years ago—­paid little or no attention to political matters.  The professors and students have had their noses buried in their departmental science and fach studies; the artisans have been engrossed with their technical work, and have been only gradually drifting away from their capitalist employers and into the Socialist camp; and the peasants—­as elsewhere over the world, absorbed in their laborious and ever-necessary labours—­have accepted their fate and paid but little attention to what was going on over their heads.  Yet these three last-mentioned classes, forming the great bulk of the nation, have been swept away, and suddenly at the last, into a huge embroilment in which to begin with they had no interest or profit.

This may seem strange, but the process after all is quite simple, and to study it in the case of Germany may throw helpful light on our own affairs.  However the blame may be apportioned between the Junker and commercial classes, it is clear that, fired by the Bismarckian programme, and greatly overstretching it, they played into each other’s hands.  The former relied for the financing of its schemes on the support of the commercials.  The latter saw in the militarists a power which might increase Germany’s trade-supremacy.  Vanity and greed are met together, patriotism and profits have kissed each other.  A Navy League and an Army League and an Air League arose.  Professors and teachers were subsidized in the universities; the children were taught Pan-Germanism in the schools; a new map of Europe was put before them.  An enormous literature grew up on the lines of Treitschke, Houston Chamberlain, and Bernhardi, with novels and romances to illustrate side-issues, and the Press playing martial music.  The students and intellectuals began to be infected; the small traders and shopkeepers were moved; and the war-fever gradually spread through the nation.  As to the artisans, they may, as I have said, have largely belonged to the Socialist party—­with its poll of four million votes in the last election—­and in the words of Herr Haase in the Reichstag just before the war, they may have wished to hold themselves apart from “this cursed Imperialist policy”;