in Germany.  There is jingoism in all countries, as there is pacifism in all countries.  Nevertheless, I think it is true to say that the jingoism of Germany has been peculiar both in its intensity and in its character.  This special quality appears to be due both to the temperament and to the recent history of the German nation.  The Germans are romantic, as the French are impulsive, the English sentimental, and the Russians religious.  There is some real meaning in these generalisations.  They are easily to be felt when one comes into contact with a nation, though they may be hard to establish or define.  When I say that the Germans are romantic, I mean that they do not easily or willingly see things as they are.  Their temperament is like a medium of coloured glass.  It magnifies, distorts, conceals, transmutes.  And this is as true when their intellectual attitude is realistic as when it is idealistic.  In the Germany of the past, the Germany of small States, to which all non-Germans look back with such sympathy and such regret, their thinkers and poets were inspired by grandiose intellectual abstractions.  They saw ideas, like gods, moving the world, and actual men and women, actual events and things, were but the passing symbols of these supernatural powers; 1866 and 1870 ended all that.  The unification of Germany, in the way we have discussed, diverted all their interest from speculation about the universe, life, and mankind, to the material interests of their new country.  Germany became the preoccupation of all Germans.  From abstractions they turned with a new intoxication to what they conceived to be the concrete.  Entering thus late upon the stage of national politics, they devoted themselves, with their accustomed thoroughness, to learning and bettering what they conceived to be the principles and the practice which had given success to other nations.  In this quest no scruples should deter them, no sentimentality hamper, no universal ideals distract.  Yet this, after all, was but German romanticism assuming another form.  The objects, it is true, were different.  “Actuality” had taken the place of ideals, Germany of Humanity.  But by the German vision the new objects were no less distorted than the old.  In dealing with “Real-politik” (which is the German translation of Machiavellianism), with “expansion,” with “survival of the fittest,” and all the other shibboleths of world-policy, their outlook remained as absolute and abstract as before, as contemptuous of temperament and measure, as blind to those compromises and qualifications, those decencies, so to speak, of nature, by which reality is constituted.  The Germans now saw men instead of gods, but they saw them as trees walking.