Let us take what we have called the real Germany first.  This Germany, the Germany of the Rhine country, of Frankfurt and Heidelberg and Cologne and Nueremberg, is the Germany which so many Englishmen know and admire.  This Germany is an integral part of the civilisation of Western Europe, and is closely akin to ourselves.  It has grown and developed alongside with France and the Netherlands and England, sharing in all the great spiritual and social movements of the West.  It has passed, with them, through the Middle Ages, the Revival of Learning, the Reformation, and the long struggle against the domination of France.  Its famous cities with their Cathedrals and Town Halls breathe the same proud, free, municipal spirit as those of their great neighbours in the Netherlands, Ghent, Antwerp, Louvain, Bruges, Ypres and the rest.  Its scholars and teachers, poets, painters, and musicians, from Luther to Goethe, have made their special German contribution to the civilised life of the West—­a contribution as great and as unique as that of Renaissance Italy or Elizabethan England.  Its people are very similar in character to their neighbours of kindred stock.  As industrious as the Dutch, as persevering as the Scotch, as steady and good-hearted as the English, good workers, good citizens, devoted in their family relations, they have found it easy to live at peace and on a good understanding with their neighbours, and when they have migrated abroad, they have by common confession made the best of settlers, both in the United States and in the British Dominions.

Yet they have developed certain characteristic qualities in their social and political life, which distinguish them sharply from their western neighbours.  History, which has deprived them, until recently, of a wider citizenship, has left them timid, docile, dreamy and unpractical in just that sphere of action where Englishmen have learnt for centuries to think and to act for themselves.  Patriotism with Englishmen is an instinct.  We do not much care to wave flags or make speeches or sing songs about it:  we assume it as the permanent background of our national life and our national consciousness.  With the Germans this is not so.  In Germany, partly owing to German history, partly owing to the constitution of the German mind, patriotism is not an instinct but an idea.  Now ideas do not grow up in men’s minds by a natural process.  They have to be implanted.  The Germans have needed to be taught to be patriotic.  The makers of German patriotism a century ago were teachers and philosophers.  They did not simply appeal to their patriotic instincts, as Englishmen would have done:  they argued the point and proved that Germany was worth fighting for:  they founded a school of patriotic German philosophy.  There are few more curious documents in history, or more instructive for the light they shed on future events, than the famous Speeches to the German Nation addressed to his fellow-countrymen