France or Russia was England’s natural enemy. The Battle of Dorking had an enormous sale; and the wildest guesses were current as to its authorship.  And its moral was “To arms; or the Germans will besiege London as they besieged Paris.”  From that time until the present, the British propaganda of war with Germany has never ceased.  The lead given by The Battle of Dorking was taken up by articles in the daily press and the magazines.  Later on came the Jingo fever (anti-Russian, by the way; but let us not mention that just now), Stead’s Truth About the Navy, Mr. Spenser Wilkinson, the suppression of the Channel Tunnel, Mr. Robert Blatchford, Mr. Garvin, Admiral Maxse, Mr. Newbolt, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, The National Review, Lord Roberts, the Navy League, the imposition of an Imperialist Foreign Secretary on the Liberal Cabinet, Mr. Wells’s War in the Air (well worth re-reading just now), and the Dreadnoughts.  Throughout all these agitations the enemy, the villain of the piece, the White Peril, was Prussia and her millions of German conscripts.  At first, in The Battle of Dorking phase, the note was mainly defensive.  But from the moment when the Kaiser began to copy our Armada policy by building a big fleet, the anti-German agitation became openly aggressive; and the cry that the German fleet or ours must sink, and that a war between England and Germany was bound to come some day, speedily ceased to be merely a cry with our Militarists and became an axiom with them.  And what our Militarists said our Junkers echoed; and our Junker diplomatists played for.  The story of how they manoeuvred to hem Germany and Austria in with an Anglo-Franco-Russian combination will be found told with soldierly directness and with the proud candor of a man who can see things from his own side only in the article by Lord Roberts in the current number of The Hibbert Journal (October, 1914).  There you shall see also, after the usual nonsense about Nietzsche, the vision of “British administrators bearing the White Man’s Burden,” of “young men, fresh from the public schools of Britain, coming eagerly forward to carry on the high traditions of Imperial Britain in each new dependency which comes under our care,” of “our fitness as an Imperial race,” of “a great task committed to us by Providence,” of “the will to conquer that has never failed us,” of our task of “assuming control of one-fifth of the earth’s surface and the care of one in five of all the inhabitants of the world.”  Not a suggestion that the inhabitants of the world are perhaps able to take care of themselves.  Not even a passing recollection when that White Man’s Burden is in question that the men outside the British Empire, and even inside the German Empire, are by no means exclusively black.  Only the sancta simplicitas that glories in “the proud position of England,” the “sympathy, tolerance, prudence and benevolence of our rule” in the east (as shown, the Kaiser