a man-child with ease; the greater the destiny, the weaker the immediate self-protection may be.  And to me it seems that your complete and perfect imperialism, ruled by Germans for Germans, is in its scope and outlook a more antiquated and smaller and less noble thing than these sprawling emergent giant democracies of the West that struggle so confusedly against it....

But that we do struggle confusedly, with pitiful leaders and infinite waste and endless delay; that it is to our indisciplines and to the dishonesties and tricks our incompleteness provokes, that the prolongation of this war is to be ascribed, I readily admit.  At the outbreak of this war I had hoped to see militarism felled within a year....

Section 6

From this point onward Mr. Britling’s notes became more fragmentary.  They had a consecutiveness, but they were discontinuous.  His thought had leapt across gaps that his pen had had no time to fill.  And he had begun to realise that his letter to the old people in Pomerania was becoming impossible.  It had broken away into dissertation.

“Yet there must be dissertations,” he said.  “Unless such men as we are take these things in hand, always we shall be misgoverned, always the sons will die....”

Section 7

I do not think you Germans realise how steadily you were conquering the world before this war began.  Had you given half the energy and intelligence you have spent upon this war to the peaceful conquest of men’s minds and spirits, I believe that you would have taken the leadership of the world tranquilly—­no man disputing.  Your science was five years, your social and economic organisation was a quarter of a century in front of ours....  Never has it so lain in the power of a great people to lead and direct mankind towards the world republic and universal peace.  It needed but a certain generosity of the imagination....

But your Junkers, your Imperial court, your foolish vicious Princes; what were such dreams to them?...  With an envious satisfaction they hurled all the accomplishment of Germany into the fires of war....

Section 8

Your boy, as no doubt you know, dreamt constantly of such a world peace as this that I foreshadow; he was more generous than his country.  He could envisage war and hostility only as misunderstanding.  He thought that a world that could explain itself clearly would surely be at peace.  He was scheming always therefore for the perfection and propagation of Esperanto or Ido, or some such universal link.  My youngster too was full of a kindred and yet larger dream, the dream of human science, which knows neither king nor country nor race....

    These boys, these hopes, this war has killed....