completely with that militarism that has brought about the European catastrophe; in repudiating him Germany will repudiate her essential offence against civilisation, and his appears to be the sort of personality that it is a pleasure to repudiate.  He or some kindred regent will be the symbol of royalty in Germany through all those years of maximum stress and hardship ahead.  Through-out the greater part of Germany the tradition of loyalty to his house is not a century old.  And the real German loyalty is racial and national far more than dynastic.  It is not the Hohenzollern over all that they sing about; it is Deutschland. (And—­as in the case of all imperfectly civilised people—­songs of hate for foreigners.) But it needed a decadent young American to sing: 

  “Thou Prince of Peace,
  Thou God of War,”

to the dismal rhetorician of Potsdam.  Real emperors reconcile and consolidate peoples, for an empire is not a nation; but the Hohenzollerns have never dared to be anything but sedulously national, “echt Deutsch” and advocates of black-letter.  They know the people they have to deal with.

This new substantial middle mass of Germany has never been on friendly terms with the Germany of the court and the landowner.  It has inherited a burgerlich tradition and resented even while it tolerated the swagger of the aristocratic officer.  It tolerated it because that sort of thing was supposed to be necessary to the national success.  But Munich, the comic papers, Herr Harden, Vorwaerts, speak, I think, for the central masses of German life far more truly than any official utterances do.  They speak in a voice a little gross, very sensible, blunt, with a kind of heavy humour.  That German voice one may not like, but one must needs respect it.  It is, at any rate, not bombastic.  It is essentially honest.  When the imperial eagle comes home with half its feathers out like a crow that has met a bear; when the surviving aristocratic officers reappear with a vastly diminished swagger in the biergartens, I believe that the hitherto acquiescent middle classes and skilled artisan class of German will entirely disappoint those people who expect them to behave either with servility or sentimental loyalty.  The great revolutionary impulse of the French was passionate and generous.  The revolutionary impulse of Germany may be even more deadly; it may be contemptuous.  It may be they will not even drag emperor and nobles down; they will shove them aside....

In all these matters one must ask the reader to enlarge his perspectives at least as far back as the last three centuries.  The galaxy of German monarchies that has over-spread so much of Europe is a growth of hardly more than two centuries.  It is a phase in the long process of the break-up of the Roman Empire and of the catholic system that inherited its tradition.  These royalties have formed a class apart, breeding only among themselves, and attempting to preserve a sort of caste internationalism in the face of an advance in human intelligence, a spread of printing, reading, and writing that makes inevitably for the recrudescence of national and race feeling, and the increasing participation of the people in government.