German prisons for selling English, French, and Belgian newspapers."[2] “Our fearless German warriors,” writes the leading German dramatist, Gerhart Hauptmann,[3] “are well aware of the reasons for which they have taken the field.  No illiterates will be found among them.  Many of them, besides shouldering their muskets, carry their Goethe’s Faust, some work of Schopenhauer, a Bible, or a Homer in their knapsacks.”  Such is a serious German writer’s idea of the way in which civilisation is diffused!

[Footnote 1:  Speeches and Lectures, pp. 147-148 (1913 edition).]

[Footnote 2:  Daily Papers, October 12, 1914 (Exchange Telegram from Rotterdam).]

[Footnote 3:  Letter quoted in the Westminster Gazette.]

With such a philosophy of human progress as this, German thinkers and statesmen look out into the future and behold nothing but conflict—­eternal conflict between rival national “cultures,” each seeking to impose its domination.  “In the struggle between Nationalities,” writes Prince Buelow,[1] in defence of his Polish policy, putting into a cruder form the philosophy of Wilamowitz, “one nation is the hammer and the other the anvil; one is the victor and the other the vanquished.  It is a law of life and development in history that where two national civilisations meet they fight for supremacy.”

[Footnote 1:  Imperial Germany, p. 245 (1st ed.).]

Here we have the necessary and logical result of the philosophy of culture.  In the struggle between cultures no collaboration, no compromise even, is possible.  German is German:  Flemish is Flemish:  Polish is Polish:  French is French.  Who is to decide which is the “more civilised,” which is the fitter to survive?  Force alone can settle the issue.  A Luther and Goethe may be the puppets pitted in a contest of culture against Maeterlinck and Victor Hugo.  But it is Krupp and Zeppelin and the War-Lord that pull the strings.  As Wilamowitz reminds us, it was the Roman legions, not Virgil and Horace, that stamped out the Celtic languages and romanised Western Europe.  It is the German army, two thousand years later, that is to germanise it.  It is an old, old theory; Prussia did not invent it, nor even Rome.  “You know as well as we do,” said the Athenians in 416 B.C. to the representatives of a small people of that day,[1] “that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”; and they went on, like the Kaiser, to claim the favour of the gods, “neither our pretensions nor our conduct being in any way contrary to what men believe of the gods, or practise amongst themselves.”  There is, in fact, to be no Law between Nations but the Rule of the Stronger.

[Footnote 1:  Thucydides, Book v. 89 and 105.]