imagination, strike one as bearing particularly German names.  There are indeed very grave grounds for the German complaint that Germany has been the victim of alien flattery and alien precedents.  And what after all is the Prussian dream of world empire but an imitative response to the British empire and the adventure of Napoleon?  The very title of the German emperor is the name of an Italian, Caesar, far gone in decay.  And the backbone of the German system at the present time is the Prussian, who is not really a German at all but a Germanised Wend.  Take away the imported and imposed elements from the things we fight to-day, leave nothing but what is purely and originally German, and you leave very little.  We fight dynastic ambition, national vanity, greed, and the fruits of fifty years of basely conceived and efficiently conducted education.

The majority of sensible and influential Englishmen are fully aware of these facts.  This does not alter their resolution to beat Germany thoroughly and finally, and, if Germany remains Hohenzollern after the war, to do their utmost to ring her in with commercial alliances, tariffs, navigation and exclusion laws that will keep her poor and powerless and out of mischief so long as her vice remains in her.  But these considerations of the essential innocence of the German do make all this systematic hostility, which the British have had forced upon them, a very uncongenial and reluctant hostility.  Pro-civilisation, and not Anti-German, is the purpose of the Allies.  And the speculation of just how relentlessly and for how long this ring of suspicion and precaution need be maintained about Germany, of how soon the German may decide to become once more a good European, is one of extraordinary interest to every civilised man.  In other words, what are the prospects of a fairly fundamental revolution in German life and thought and affairs in the years immediately before us?

Sec.2

In a sense every European country must undergo revolutionary changes as a consequence of the enormous economic exhaustion and social dislocations of this war.  But what I propose to discuss here is the possibility of a real political revolution, in the narrower sense of the word, in Germany, a revolution that will end the Hohenzollern system, the German dynastic system, altogether, that will democratise Prussia and put an end for ever to that secretive scheming of military aggressions which is the essential quarrel of Europe with Germany.  It is the most momentous possibility of our times, because it opens the way to an alternative state of affairs that may supersede the armed watching and systematic war of tariffs, prohibitions, and exclusions against the Central Empires that must quite unavoidably be the future attitude of the Pledged Allies to any survival of the Hohenzollern empire.