But it was either by accident or by individual diplomatic skill that England at the end of the three years even had her own hands free to help in frustrating the German plot.  The mass of the English people had no notion of such a plot; and indeed regarded the occasional suggestion of it as absurd.  Nor did even the people who knew best know very much better.  Thanks and even apologies are doubtless due to those who in the deepest lull of our sleeping partnership with Prussia saw her not as a partner but a potential enemy; such men as Mr. Blatchford, Mr. Bart Kennedy, or the late Emil Reich.  But there is a distinction to be made.  Few even of these, with the admirable and indeed almost magical exception of Dr. Sarolea, saw Germany as she was; occupied mainly with Europe and only incidentally with England; indeed, in the first stages, not occupied with England at all.  Even the Anti-Germans were too insular.  Even those who saw most of Germany’s plan saw too much of England’s part in it.  They saw it almost wholly as a commercial and colonial quarrel; and saw its issue under the image of an invasion of England, which is even now not very probable.  This fear of Germany was indeed a very German fear of Germany.  This also conceived the English as Sea-Germans.  It conceived Germany as at war with something like itself—­practical, prosaic, capitalist, competitive Germany, prepared to cut us up in battle as she cut us out in business.  The time of our larger vision was not yet, when we should realise that Germany was more deeply at war with things quite unlike herself, things from which we also had sadly strayed.  Then we should remember what we were and see whence we also had come; and far and high upon that mountain from which the Crescent was cast down, behold what was everywhere the real enemy of the Iron Cross—­the peasant’s cross, which is of wood.

Even our very slight ripples of panic, therefore, were provincial, and even shallow; and for the most part we were possessed and convinced of peace.  That peace was not a noble one.  We had indeed reached one of the lowest and flattest levels of all our undulating history; and it must be admitted that the contemptuous calculation with which Germany counted on our submission and abstention was not altogether unfounded, though it was, thank God, unfulfilled.  The full fruition of our alliances against freedom had come.  The meek acceptance of Kultur in our books and schools had stiffened what was once a free country with a German formalism and a German fear.  By a queer irony, even the same popular writer who had already warned us against the Prussians, had sought to preach among the populace a very Prussian fatalism, pivoted upon the importance of the charlatan Haeckel.  The wrestle of the two great parties had long slackened into an embrace.  The fact was faintly denied, and a pretence was still made that no pact:  existed beyond a common patriotism.  But the pretence failed altogether; for it was evident that the leaders