In either case, I do not see how he can keep the habitual and cultivated German hate pointing steadily away from himself.  So long as the war is going on that may be done, but when the soldiers come home the hate will come home as well.  In times of war peoples may hate abroad and with some unanimity.  But after the war, with no war going on or any prospect of a fresh war, with every exploiter and every industrial tyrant who has made his unobtrusive profits while the country scowled and spat at England, stripped of the cover of that excitement, then it is inevitable that much of this noble hate of England will be seen for the cant it is.  The cultivated hate of the war phase, reinforced by the fresh hate born of confusion and misery, will swing loose, as it were, seeking dispersedly for objects.  The petty, incessant irritations of proximity will count for more; the national idea for less.  The Hohenzollerns and the Junkers will have to be very nimble indeed if the German accomplishment of hate does not swing round upon them.

It is a common hypothesis with those who speculate on the probable effects of these disillusionments that Germany may break up again into its component parts.  It is pointed out that Germany is, so to speak, a palimpsest, that the broad design of the great black eagle and the imperial crown are but newly painted over a great number of particularisms, and that these particularisms may return.  The empire of the Germans may break up again.  That I do not believe.  The forces that unified Germany lie deeper than the Hohenzollern adventure; print, paper and the spoken word have bound Germany now into one people for all time.  None the less those previous crowns and symbols that still show through the paint of the new design may help greatly, as that weakens under the coming stresses, to disillusion men about its necessity.  There was, they will be reminded, a Germany before Prussia, before Austria for the matter of that.  The empire has been little more than the first German experiment in unity.  It is a new-fangled thing that came and may go again—­leaving Germany still a nation, still with the sense of a common Fatherland.

Let us consider a little more particularly the nature of the mass of population whose collective action in the years immediately ahead of us we are now attempting to forecast.  Its social strata are only very inexactly equivalent to those in the countries of the Pledged Allies.  First there are the masses of the people.  In England for purposes of edification we keep up the legend of the extreme efficiency of Germany, the high level of German education, and so forth.  The truth is that the average elementary education of the common people in Britain is superior to that of Germany, that the domestic efficiency of the British common people is greater, their moral training better, and their personal quality higher.  This is shown by a number of quite conclusive facts of which I will instance merely the higher German general