would reply, “Look at the sort of people we are, and at the things we have done,” and would point perhaps to the extracts from the letters of private soldiers printed in the newspapers, or to the story of the growth of the British Empire; a German would reply (as Germans are indeed replying now), “Look at our achievements in scholarship and science, at our universities, at our systems of education, at our literature, our music, and our painting; at our great men of thought and imagination:  at Luther, Duerer, Goethe, Beethoven, Kant.”

Kultur then means more than “culture”:  it means culture considered as the most important element in civilisation. It implies the disciplined education which alone, in the German view, makes the difference between the savage and the civilised man.  It implies the heritage of intellectual possessions which, thanks to ordered institutions, a nation is able to hand down from generation to generation.

We are now beginning to see where the British and German attitudes towards society and civilisation diverge.  Broadly, we may say that the first difference is that Germany thinks of civilisation in terms of intellect while we think of it in terms of character.  Germany asks, “What do you know?” “What have you learnt?” and regards our prisoners as uncivilised because they cannot speak German, and Great Britain as a traitor to civilisation because she is allied with Russia, a people of ignorant peasants.  We ask, “What have you done?” “What can you do?” and tend to undervalue the importance of systematic knowledge and intellectual application.

But we have found no reason as yet for a conflict of ideals.  Many English writers, such as Matthew Arnold, have emphasised the importance of culture as against character; yet Matthew Arnold’s views were widely different from those of the German professors of to-day.  If their sense of the importance of culture stopped short at this point, we should have much to learn from Germany, as indeed we have, and no reason to oppose her.  What is there then in the German admiration for culture which involves her in a conflict with British ideals?

Sec.3. Culture as a State Product.—­The conflict arises out of the alliance between German culture and the German Government.  What British public opinion resents, in the German attitude, is not culture in itself, about which it is little concerned, but what we feel to be its unnatural alliance with military power.  It seems to us wicked and hypocritical for a government which proclaims the doctrine of the “mailed fist” and, like the ancient Spartans, glories in the perfecting of the machinery of war, to be at the same time protesting its devotion to culture, and posing as a patron of the peaceful arts.  It is the Kaiser’s speeches and the behaviour of the German Government which have put all of us out of heart with German talk about culture.