This difficulty should serve to remind us how defective the machinery of civilisation still is.  One of the chief functions of law is, not merely to settle disputes and to enforce its decisions, but to ascertain the true facts on which alone a settlement can be based.  The fact that no tribunal exists for ascertaining the true facts in disputes between sovereign governments shows how far mankind still is from an established “rule of law” in international affairs.  Not only is the Hague powerless to give and, still more, to enforce its decision on the questions at issue between the European Powers.  It has not even the machinery for ascertaining the facts of the case and bringing them to the notice of neutral governments and peoples in the name of civilisation as a whole.

But apart from divergent beliefs as to the facts, it is remarkable that thinking Germany should be in sympathy with the spirit and tone of German policy, which led, as it appears to us, by an inexorable logic to the violation of Belgian neutrality and the collision with Great Britain.

But the fact, we are told, admits of easy explanation.  Thinking Germany has fallen a victim to the teachings of Treitschke and Nietzsche—­Treitschke with his Macchiavellian doctrine that “Power is the end-all and be-all of a State,” Nietzsche with his contempt for pity and the gentler virtues, his admiration for “valour,” and his disdain for Christianity.

This explanation is too simple to fit the facts.  It may satisfy those who know no more of Treitschke’s brilliant and careful work than the extracts culled from his occasional writings by General von Bernhardi and the late Professor Cramb.  It may gratify those who, with so many young German students, forget that Nietzsche, like many other prophets, wrote in allegory, and that when he spoke of valour he was thinking, not of “shining armour,” but of spiritual conflicts.  But careful enquirers, who would disdain to condemn Macaulay on passages selected by undiscriminating admirers from his Essays, or Carlyle for his frank admiration of Thor and Odin and the virtues of Valhalla, will ask for a more satisfying explanation.  Even if all that were said about Treitschke and Nietzsche were true, it would still remain an unsolved question why they and their ideas should have taken intellectual Germany by storm.  But it is not true.  What is true, and what is far more serious, both for Great Britain and for Europe, is that men like Harnack, Eucken, and Wilamowitz, who would repudiate all intellectual kinship with Macchiavelli and Nietzsche—­men who are leaders of European thought, and with whom and whose ideas we shall have to go on living in Europe—­publicly support and encourage the policy and standpoint of a Government which, according to British ideas, has acted with criminal wickedness and folly, and so totally misunderstood the conduct and attitude of Great Britain as honestly to regard us as hypocritically treacherous to the highest interests of civilisation.