In this she had the example of Britain before her.  Britain had laid land to land and market to market over the globe, and showed no particular scruple in the matter.  Why should not Germany do the same?  It was true that Britain always carried the Bible with her—­but this was mere British cant.  Britain carried the Bible in her left hand, but in her right a sword; and when she used the latter she always let the former drop.  Germany could do likewise—­but without that odious pretence of morality, and those crocodile tears over the unfortunates whom she devoured.  It was only a question of Might and Organization and Armament.

So far Germany seems to have had a perfectly good case; and though we in England might not like her ambitions, we could not reasonably find fault with motives so perfectly similar to our own.  We might, indeed, make a grievance of the frank brutality displayed in her methods and the defence of them; but then, she might with equal right object to our everlasting pretence of “morality,” and our concealment of mercenary and imperial aims under the cloak of virtue and innocence.  One really must confess that it is difficult to say which is the worse.

But if the crystallization of Germany round the Prussian nucleus was for the time the source of Germany’s success, it is a question whether it is not even now becoming something quite different, and the likely cause of a serious downfall.  It would seem hardly probable that the amalgamation between elements so utterly dissimilar can permanently endure.  The kindly, studious, sociable, rather naively innocent German mass-people dragged by the scruff of the neck into the arena of militarism and world-politics, may for a time have had their heads turned by the exalted position in which they found themselves; but it is not likely that they will continue for long to enjoy the situation.  With no great instinct for politics, nor any marked gift of tact and discernment, unsuccessful as a rule as colonists,[17] and with no understanding of how to govern—­except on the Prussian lines, which are every day becoming more obsolete and less adapted to the modern world—­the role which their empire-building philosophers set out for them is one which they are eminently unfitted to fulfil.  It is sad, but we cannot blame them for the defect.  They blame the world in general for siding against them in this affair, but do not see that in most cases it has been their own want of perception which has left them on the wrong side of the hedge.

Bismarck, with his “Blood and Iron” policy, made a huge blunder in not perceiving that in the modern world spiritual forces are arising which must for ever discredit the same.  He emphasized the blunder by wresting Alsace-Lorraine from France, and again by crippling Russia in the treaty of 1878—­thus making enemies where generosity might have brought him friends.  The German Executive in July of last year (1914) showed extraordinary want of tact