It is just this intimate union between different nations for the furtherance of the tasks of civilisation which it seems so difficult for the German mind to understand.  “Culture,” with all its intimate associations, its appeal to language, to national history and traditions, and to instinctive patriotism, is so much simpler and warmer a conception:  it seems so much easier to fight for Germany than to fight for Justice in the abstract, or for Justice embodied in the British Commonwealth.  That is why even serious German thinkers, blinded by the idea of culture, expected the break-up of the British Empire.  They could imagine Indians giving their lives for India, Boers for a Dutch South Africa, Irishmen for Ireland or Ulstermen for Ulster; but the deeper moral appeal which has thrilled through the whole Empire, down to its remotest island dependency, lay beyond their ken.

Let us look a little more closely at the German idea of national culture rather than national character as the chief element in civilisation.  We shall see that it is directly contrary to the ideals which inspire and sustain the British Commonwealth, and practically prohibits that association of races and peoples at varying levels of social progress which is its peculiar task.

“Culture,” in the German idea, is the justification of a nation’s existence.  Nationality has no other claim.  Goethe, Luther, Kant, and Beethoven are Germany’s title-deeds.  A nation without a culture has no right to a “place in the sun.”  “History,” says Wilamowitz in a lecture delivered in 1898, “knows nothing of any right to exist on the part of a people or a language without a culture.  If a people becomes dependent on a foreign culture” (i.e. in the German idea, on a foreign civilisation) “it matters little if its lower classes speak a different language:  they, too ... must eventually go over to the dominant language....  Wisely to further this necessary organic process is a blessing to all parties; violent haste will only curb it and cause reactions.  Importunate insistence on Nationality has never anywhere brought true vitality into being, and often destroyed vitality; but the superior Culture which, sure of its inner strength, throws her doors wide open, can win men’s hearts."[1] In the light of a passage like this, from the most distinguished representative of German humanism, it is easier to grasp the failure of educated Germany to understand the sequel of the South African War, or the aspirations of the Slav peoples, or to stigmatise the folly of their statesmen in Poland, Denmark, Alsace-Lorraine, and Belgium.  “Importunate insistence on Nationality”—­the words come home to us now with a new meaning when we learn that in Belgium, now perforce “dependent on a foreign culture,” babies are registered under German names and newspapers printed in “the dominant language,” and that already “forty newspaper vendors in Brussels have been sentenced to long terms of hard labour in