to her full stature, she found that the choice places of the world and those most fitted for the spread of a transplanted European race were already filled up.  It was not a matter which we could help nor could we alter it, since Canada, Australia, and South Africa would not, even if we could be imagined to have wished it, be transferred to German rule.  And yet the Germans chafed, and if we can put ourselves in their places we may admit that it was galling that the surplus of their manhood should go to build up the strength of an alien and possibly a rival State.  So far we could see their grievance, or, rather their misfortune, since no one was in truth to blame in the matter.  Had their needs been openly and reasonably expressed, and had the two States moved in concord in the matter, it is difficult to think that no helpful solution of any kind could have been found.

As Germans See England.

But the German method of approaching the problem has never been to ask sympathy and co-operation, but to picture us as a degenerate race from whom anything might be gained by playing upon our imagined weakness and cowardice.  A nation which attends quietly to its own sober business must, according to their mediaeval notions, be a nation of decadent poltroons.  If we fight our battles by means of free volunteers instead of enforced conscripts then the military spirit must be dead among us.  Perhaps, even in this short campaign, they have added this delusion also to the dust-bin of their many errors.  But such was their absurd self-deception about the most virile of European races.  Did we propose disarmament, then it was not humanitarianism but cowardice that prompted us, and their answer was to enlarge their programme.  Did we suggest a navy-building holiday, it was but a cloak for our weakness and an incitement that they should redouble their efforts.  Our decay had become a part of their national faith.  At first the wish may have been the father to the thought, but soon under the reiterated assertions of their crazy professors the proposition became indisputable.  Bernhardi in his book upon the next war cannot conceal the contempt in which he has learned to hold us.  Neibuhr long ago had prophesied the coming fall of Britain, and every year was believed to bring it nearer and to make it more certain.  To these jaundiced eyes all seemed yellow, when the yellowness lay only in themselves.  Our army, our navy, our colonies, all were equally rotten.  “Old England, old, indeed, and corrupt, rotten through and through.”  One blow and the vast sham would fly to pieces, and from those pieces the victor could choose his reward.  Listen to Prof.  Treitschke, a man who, above all others, has been the evil genius of his country, and has done most to push it toward this abyss:  “A thing that is wholly a sham,” he cried, in allusion to our empire, “cannot, in this universe of ours, endure forever.  It may endure for a day, but its doom is certain.”  Were ever words more true when applied to the narrow bureaucracy and swaggering Junkerdom of Prussia, the most artificial and ossified sham that ever our days have seen?  See which will crack first, our democracy or this, now that both have been plunged into the furnace together.  The day of God’s testing has come, and we shall see which can best abide it.