the National Review is England.  Germans, in fact, during recent years have taken a prominent place in pacifism as well as in imperialism.  Men like Schuecking and Quidde and Fried are at least as well known as men like Treitschke and Bernhardi.  Opinion in Germany, as in every other country, has been various and conflicting.  And the pacific tendencies have been better organized, if not more active, there than elsewhere, for they have been associated with the huge and disciplined forces of the Social-Democrats.  Indeed, the mass of the people, left alone, is everywhere pacific.  I do not forget the very important fact that German education, elementary and higher, has been deliberately directed to inculcate patriotic feeling, that the doctrine of armed force as the highest manifestation of the State has been industriously propagated by the authorities, and that the unification of Germany by force has given to the cult of force a meaning and a popularity probably unknown in any other country.  But in most men, for good or for evil, the lessons of education can be quickly obliterated by the experience of life.  In particular, the mass of the people everywhere, face to face with the necessities of existence, knowing what it is to work and to struggle, to co-operate and to compete, to suffer and to relieve suffering, though they may be less well-informed than the instructed classes, are also less liable to obsession by abstractions.  They see little, but they see it straight.  And though, being men, with the long animal inheritance of men behind them, their passions may be roused by any cry of battle, though they are the fore-ordained dupes of those who direct the policy of nations, yet it is not their initiative that originates wars.  They do not desire conquest, they do not trouble about “race” or chatter about the “survival of the fittest.”  It is their own needs, which are also the vital needs of society, that preoccupy their thoughts; and it is real goods that direct and inspire their genuine idealism.

We must, then, disabuse ourselves of the notion so naturally produced by reading, and especially by reading in time of war, that the German Jingoes are typical of Germany.  They are there, they are a force, they have to be reckoned with.  But exactly how great a force?  Exactly how influential on policy?  That is a question which I imagine can only be answered by guesses.  Would the reader, for instance, undertake to estimate the influence during the last fifteen years on British policy and opinion of the imperialist minority in this country?  No two men, I think, would agree about it.  And few men would agree with themselves from one day or one week to another.  We are reduced to conjecture.  But the conjectures of some people are of more value than those of others, for they are based on a wider converse.  I think it therefore not without importance to recall to the reader the accounts of the state of opinion in Germany given by well-qualified foreign observers in the years immediately preceding the war.