Atlantic.  Hence we intend to absorb one after another all the provinces which neighbour on Prussia.  We will successively annex Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Northern Switzerland, then Trieste and Venice, finally Northern France from the Sambre to the Loire.  This programme we fearlessly pronounce.  It is not the work of a madman.  The Empire we intend to found will be no Utopia.  We have ready to our hands the means of founding it, and no coalition in the world can stop us.”

Bronsart von Schellendorf (1832-91) was one of the Prussian Generals who negotiated the surrender of the French at Sedan.  He became Chief of the Staff, and War Minister (1883-9), and wrote on Tactics, etc.  His above utterance, therefore, cannot be neglected as that of an irresponsible person.

There is, as I have already had occasion to say, a certain easygoing absurdity in the habit we commonly have of talking of nations —­“Germany,” “France,” “England,” and so forth—­as if they were simple and plainly responsible persons or individuals, when all the time we know perfectly well that they are more like huge whirlpools of humanity caused by the impact and collision of countless and often opposing currents flowing together from various directions.  Yet there is this point of incontestable similarity between nations and individual persons, that both occasionally go mad!  If Germany was afflicted by a kind of madness or divine dementia previous to the present war, Britain can by no means throw that in her teeth, for Britain certainly went mad over Mafeking; and it was sheer madness that in 1870 threw the people of France and Napoleon III—­utterly unready for war as they were, and over a most trifling quarrel—­into the arms of Bismarck for the fulfilment of his schemes.

But that some sort of madness did, in consequence of the above-mentioned circumstances, seize the German people shortly before the outbreak of the present war we can hardly doubt, though (remembering the proverb) we must not put the blame for that on her, but on the gods.  It was a heady intoxication, caused largely, I believe, by that era of unexampled commercial prosperity following upon a period of great political and military expansion, and confirmed by the direct incitement of the military and political teachers I have mentioned.  All these things, acting on a people unskilled in politics—­of whom Bernhardi himself says “We are a non-political people"[15]—­had their natural effect.  But it seems part of the irony of fate that at this very juncture Germany should have fallen under the influence of a man who of all the world was perhaps least fitted to guide her steadily through a difficult crisis.  “We all know the Kaiser,” says Mr. Fisher, “the most amazing and amusing figure on the great stage of politics.  The outlines of his character are familiar to everybody, for his whole life is spent in the full glare of publicity.  We know his impulsiveness, his naivete, his heady fits of wild passion, his spacious curiosity and quick grasp of detail, his portentous lack of humour and delicacy, his childish vanity and domineering will.  A character so romantic, spontaneous, and robust must always be a favourite with the British people, who, were his lunacies less formidable, would regard him as the most delectable burlesque of the age.”