It is very difficult for anyone who is not either a Junker or a successful barrister to get into an English Cabinet, no matter which party is in power, or to avoid resigning when we strike up the drum.  The Foreign Office is a Junker Club.  Our governing classes are overwhelmingly Junker:  all who are not Junkers are riff-raff whose only claim to their position is the possession of ability of some sort:  mostly ability to make money.  And, of course, the Kaiser is a Junker, though less true-blue than the Crown Prince, and much less autocratic than Sir Edward Grey, who, without consulting us, sends us to war by a word to an ambassador and pledges all our wealth to his foreign allies by a stroke of his pen.

What Is a Militarist?

Now that we know what a Junker is, let us have a look at the Militarists.  A Militarist is a person who believes that all real power is the power to kill, and that Providence is on the side of the big battalions.  The most famous Militarist at present, thanks to the zeal with which we have bought and quoted his book, is General Friedrich von Bernhardi.  But we cannot allow the General to take precedence of our own writers as a Militarist propagandist.  I am old enough to remember the beginning of the anti-German phase of that very ancient propaganda in England.  The Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 left Europe very much taken aback.  Up to that date nobody was afraid of Prussia, though everybody was a little afraid of France; and we were keeping “buffer States” between ourselves and Russia in the east.  Germany had indeed beaten Denmark; but then Denmark was a little State, and was abandoned in her hour of need by those who should have helped her, to the great indignation of Ibsen.  Germany had also beaten Austria; but somehow everybody seems able to beat Austria, though nobody seems able to draw the moral that defeats do not matter as much as the Militarists think, Austria being as important as ever.  Suddenly Germany beat France right down into the dust, by the exercise of an organized efficiency in war of which nobody up to then had any conception.  There was not a State in Europe that did not say to itself:  “Good Heavens! what would happen if she attacked us?” We in England thought of our old-fashioned army and our old-fashioned commander George Ranger (of Cambridge), and our War Office with its Crimean tradition of imbecility; and we shook in our shoes.  But we were not such fools as to leave it at that.  We soon produced the first page of the Bernhardian literature:  an anonymous booklet entitled The Battle of Dorking.  It was not the first page of English Militarist literature:  you have only to turn back to the burst of glorification of war which heralded the silly Crimean campaign (Tennyson’s Maud is a surviving sample) to find paeans to Mars which would have made Treitschke blush (perhaps they did); but it was the first page in which it was assumed as a matter of course that Germany and not