of Darwinism, combined with invincible ignorance of the true bearings of science upon life, and especially of those facts and deductions about biological heredity which, once they are understood, will make it plain that war degrades the stock of all nations, victorious and vanquished alike, and that the decline of civilizations is far more plausibly to be attributed to this cause than to the moral decadence of which history is always ready, after the event, to accuse the defeated Power.  One peculiarity, perhaps, there is in the outlook of German imperialism, and that is its emphasis on an unintelligible and unreal abstraction of “race.”  Germans, it is thought, are by biological quality the salt of the earth.  Every really great man in Europe, since the break-up of the Roman Empire, has been a German, even though it might appear, at first sight, to an uninstructed observer, that he was an Italian or a Frenchman or a Spaniard.  Not all Germans, however, are, they hold, as yet included in the German Empire, or even in the German-Austrian combination.  The Flemish are Germans, the Dutch are Germans, the English even are Germans, or were before the war had made them, in Germany’s eyes, the offscouring of mankind.  Thus, a great task lies before the German Empire:  on the one hand, to bring within its fold the German stocks that have strayed from it in the wanderings of history; on the other, to reduce under German authority those other stocks that are not worthy to share directly in the citizenship of the Fatherland.  The dreams of conquest which are the real essence of all imperialism are thus supported in Germany by arguments peculiar to Germans.  But the arguments put forward are not the real determinants of the attitude.  The attitude, in any country, whatever it may be called, rests at bottom on sheer national vanity.  It is the belief in the inherent superiority of one’s own civilization, and the desire to extend it, by force if need be, throughout the world.  It matters little what arguments in its support this passion to dominate may garner from that twilight region in which the advanced guard of science is labouring patiently to comprehend Nature and mankind.  Men take from the treasury of truth what they are able to take.  And what imperialists take is a mirror to their own ambition and pride.

Now, as to the ambitions of this German jingoism there is no manner of doubt.  Germans are nothing if not frank.  And this kind of German does want to conquer and annex, not only outside Europe but within it.  We must not, however, infer that the whole of Germany has been infected with this virus.  The summary I have set down in the last few pages represents the impression made on an unsympathetic mind by the literature of Pangermanism.  Emerging from such reading—­and it is the principal reading of German origin which has been offered to the British public since the war—­there is a momentary illusion, “That is Germany!” Of course it is not, any more than the Morning Post or