civilisations meet they fight for ascendancy.  In the struggle between nationalities one nation is the hammer and the other the anvil; one is the victor and the other the vanquished."[1] No words could indicate more clearly the cause that is at stake in the present war.  They show us that there are still governments in Europe so ignorant as to believe that the different nationalities of mankind are necessarily hostile to one another, and so foolish and brutal as to think that national civilisation, or, as the German Professors call it, “culture,” can and indeed must be propagated by the sword.  It is this extraordinary conception which is at the back of protests like that of Professor Haeckel and Professor Eucken (men whom, in the field of their own studies, all Europe is proud to honour) against “England fighting with a half-Asiatic power against Germanism."[2]

[Footnote 1:  Imperial Germany, by Prince Bernhard von Buelow, English translation, 1st ed. pp. 245-6 (London, 1914).]

[Footnote 2:  Protest of Professors Ernst Haeckel and Rudolf Eucken of Jena, quoted in The Times from the Vossische Zeitung of August 20, 1914.]

There are not only half-Asiatics, there are real Asiatics side by side with England; and England is not ashamed of it.  For she does not reckon the culture of Europe as higher than the culture of Asia, or regard herself as the hammer upon the anvil of India.

Prince Buelow’s words, and the theory of policy underlying them, really go to the root of the whole trouble in European politics.  They explain the Balance of Power, the competition in armaments, the belief in the inevitability and the moral value of war, and all those common European shibboleths which seem so inexplicable to citizens of the more modern-minded States and communities of the world.  Why should Germany and Austria arm against France and Russia when Canada does not arm against the United States?  Why should a Balance of Power be necessary to the maintenance of European Peace when we do not consider the preponderance of a single Power, such as the United States in North, Central and South America, or Great Britain in the Pacific or Southern Asia dangerous to the peace of the whole world?  Why, finally, to press Prince Buelow’s logic home, if members of different nationalities cannot live side by side without playing the game of Hammer and Anvil together, are not the English spending the whole of their energy fighting the Welsh, the Scotch, and the Irish in the United Kingdom, the Dutch in South Africa, and the French in Canada, not to speak of the Jews in every part of the British Empire?  The fact is that the statesmen of Germany and Austria-Hungary, and of Russia also, have missed the chief lesson of recent history and politics:  that in the growing complexity of world-relations power is falling more and more, of necessity, into the hands of States which are not Nations but Commonwealths of Nations, States composed, like the British Empire and the United States, of a variety of nationalities and “cultures,” living peacefully, each with its own institutions, under a single law and a single central government.