The question I have asked is a difficult question to answer, or, rather, the answer is not easy to formulate briefly and clearly.  Most of the men at the front know quite well what they are fighting for; they know that it is for their country, but that it is also for their kind—­for certain ideals of humanity.  We at home know that we are at war for liberty and humanity.  But these words are invoked by different nations in different senses; the Germans, or at least most of them, have as much liberty as they desire, and believe that the highest good of humanity is to be found in the prevalence of their own ideas and of their own type of government and society.  No abstract demonstration can help us.  Liberty is a highly comparative notion; no one asks for it complete.  Humanity is a highly variable notion; it is interpreted in different senses by different societies.  What we are confronted by is two types of character, two sets of aims, two ideals for society.  There can be no harm in trying to understand both.

The Germans can never be understood by those who neglect their history.  They are a solid, brave, and earnest people, who, till quite recent times, have been denied their share in the government of Europe.  In the sixteenth century they were deeply stirred by questions of religion, and were rent asunder by the Reformation.  Compromise proved futile; the small German states were ranked on this side or on that at the will of their rulers and princes; men of the same race were ranged in mortal opposition on the question of religious belief, and there was no solution but war.  For thirty years in the seventeenth century the war raged.  It was conducted with a fierceness and inhumanity that even the present war has not equalled.  The civilian population suffered hideously.  Whole provinces were desolated and whole states were bereaved of their men.  When, from mere exhaustion, the war came to an end, Germany lay prostrate, and the chief gains of the war fell to the rising monarchy of France, which had intervened in the middle of the struggle.  By the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 Alsace and Lorraine went to France, and the rule of the great monarch, Louis XIV, had nothing to fear from the German peoples.  The ambitions of Germany, for long after this, were mainly cosmopolitan and intellectual.  But political ambitions, though they seemed almost dead, were revived by the hardy state of Prussia, and the rest of Germany’s history, down to our own time, is the history of the welding of the Germanic peoples into a single state by Prussian monarchs and statesmen.

This history explains many things.  If a people has a corporate memory, if it can learn from its own sufferings, Germany has reason enough to cherish with a passionate devotion her late achieved unity.  And German brutality, which is not the less brutality because Germans regard it as quite natural and right, has its origin in German history.  The Prussian is a Spartan, a natural brute, but brutal to himself