We have to bear in mind that in this discussion we are dealing with something very new and quite untried hitherto by anything but success, that new Germany whose unification began with the spoliation of Denmark and was completed at Versailles.  It is not a man’s lifetime old.  Under the state socialism and aggressive militarism of the Hohenzollern regime it had been led to a level of unexampled pride and prosperity, and it plunged shouting and singing into this war, confident of victories.  It is still being fed with dwindling hopes of victory, no longer unstinted hopes, but still hopes—­by a sort of political bread-card system.  The hopes outlast the bread-and-butter, but they dwindle and dwindle.  How is this parvenu people going to stand the cessation of hope, the realisation of the failure and fruitlessness of such efforts as no people on earth have ever made before?  How are they going to behave when they realise fully that they have suffered and died and starved and wasted all their land in vain?  When they learn too that the cause of the war was a trick, and the Russian invasion a lie?  They have a large democratic Press that will not hesitate to tell them that, that does already to the best of its ability disillusion them.  They are a carefully trained and educated and disciplined people, it is true[4]; but the solicitude of the German Government everywhere apparent, thus to keep the resentment of the people directed to the proper quarter, is, I think, just one of the things that are indicative of the revolutionary possibilities in Germany.  The Allied Governments let opinion, both in their own countries and in America, shift for itself; they do not even trouble to mitigate the inevitable exasperation of the military censorship by an intelligent and tactful control.  The German Government, on the other hand, has organised the putting of the blame upon other shoulders than its own elaborately and ably from the very beginning of the war.  It must know its own people best, and I do not see why it should do this if there were not very dangerous possibilities ahead for itself in the national temperament.

[Footnote 4:  A recent circular, which Vorwaerts quotes, sent by the education officials to the teachers of Frankfurt-am-Main, points out the necessity of the “beautiful task” of inculcating a deep love for the House of Hohenzollern (Crown Prince, grin and all), and concludes, “All efforts to excuse or minimise or explain the disgraceful acts which our enemies have committed against Germans all over the world are to be firmly opposed by you should you see any signs of these efforts entering the schools.”]