I mentioned that besides the growth of the commercial class, a second great cause of the war was the political ignorance of the German people.  And this is important.  Fifty years ago, and before that, when Germany was divided up into scores of small States and Duchies, the mass of its people had no practical interest in politics.  Such politics as existed, as between one Duchy and another, were mere teacup politics.  Read Eckermann’s Conversations, and see how small a part they played in Goethe’s mind.  That may have been an advantage in one way.  The brains of the nation went into science, literature, music.  And when, after 1870, the unification of Germany came, and the political leadership passed over to Prussia, the same state of affairs for a long time continued; the professors continued their investigations in the matters of the thyroid gland or the rock inscriptions in the Isle of Thera, but they left the internal regulation of the State and its foreign policy confidently in the hands of the Kaiser and the nominees of the great and rising bourgeoisie, and themselves remained unobservant and uninstructed in such matters.  It was only when these latter powers declared—­as in the Emperor’s pan-German proclamation of 1896—­that a Teutonic world-empire was about to be formed, and that the study of Welt-politik was the duty of every serious German, that the thinking and reading portion of the population suddenly turned its attention to this subject.  An immense mass of political writings—­pamphlets, prophecies, military and economic treatises, romances of German conquest, and the like—­naturally many of them of the crudest sort, was poured forth and eagerly accepted by the public, and a veritable Fool’s Paradise of German suprernacy arose.  It is only in this way, by noting the long-preceding ignorance of the German citizen in the matter of politics, his absolute former non-interference in public affairs, and the dazed state of his mind when he suddenly found himself on the supposed pinnacle of world-power—­that we can explain his easy acceptance of such cheap and ad hoc publications as those of Bernhardi and Houston Chamberlain, and the fact that he was so easily rushed into the false situation of the present war.[8] The absurd canards which at an early date gained currency, in Berlin—­as that the United States had swallowed Canada, that the Afghans in mass were invading; India, that Ireland was plunged in civil war—­point in the same direction; and so do the barbarities of the Teutonic troops in the matters of humanity and art.  For though in all war and in the heat of battle there are barbarities perpetrated, it argues a strange state of the German national psychology that in this case a heartless severity and destruction of the enemy’s life and property should have been preached beforehand, and quite deliberately, by professors and militarists, and accepted, apparently, by the general public.  It argues, to say the least, a strange want of perception of the very unfavourable impression which such a programme must inevitably excite in the mind of the world at large.