that modern Germany has been too early admitted into the comity of European nations.  Her behaviour, in her new international relations, is like the behaviour of an uneasy, jealous upstart in an old-fashioned quiet drawing-room.  She has no genius for equality; her manners are a compound of threatening and flattery.  When she wishes to assert herself, she bullies; when she wishes to endear herself, she crawls; and the one device is no more successful than the other.

Might is Right; but the sort of might which enables one nation to govern another in time of peace is very unlike the armoured thrust of the war-engine.  It is a power compounded of sympathy and justice.  The English (it is admitted by many foreign critics) have studied justice and desired justice.  They have inquired into and protected rights that were unfamiliar, and even grotesque, to their own ideas, because they believed them to be rights.  In the matter of sympathy their reputation does not stand so high; they are chill in manner, and dislike all effusive demonstrations of feeling.  Yet those who come to know them know that they are not unimaginative; they have a genius for equality; and they do try to put themselves in the other fellow’s place, to see how the position looks from that side.  What has happened in India may perhaps be taken to prove, among many other things, that the inhabitants of India begin to know that England has done her best, and does feel a disinterested solicitude for the peoples under her charge.  She has long been a mother of nations, and is not frightened by the problems of adolescence.

The Germans have as yet shown no sign of skill in governing other peoples.  Might is Right; and it is quite conceivable that they may acquire colonies by violence.  If they want to keep them they will have to shut their own professors’ books, and study the intimate history of the British Empire.  We are old hands at the business; we have lost more colonies than ever they owned, and we begin to think that we have learnt the secret of success.  At any rate, our experience has done much for us, and has helped us to avoid failure.  Yet the German colonial party stare at us with bovine malevolence.  In all the library of German theorizing you will look in vain for any explanation of the fact that the Boers are, in the main, loyal to the British Empire.  If German political thinkers could understand that political situation, which seems to English minds so simple, there might yet be hope for them.  But they regard it all as a piece of black magic, and refuse to reason about it.  How should a herd of cattle be driven without goads?  Witchcraft, witchcraft!