victory, and, of course, when the struggle comes there must be no misplaced leniency to any of the inferior races who interpose between Germany and her legitimate place in the sun.[3] The ideal is almost too naive and too ferocious to be conceived by ordinary minds.  Yet here it all stands in black and white.  According to Bernhardi’s volume German militarism means at least two things.  First the suppression of every other nationality except the German; second the suppression of the whole civilian element in the population under the heel of the German drill-sergeant.  Is it any wonder that the recent war has been conducted by Berlin with such appalling barbarism and ferocity?

[3] Germany and the Next War, by F. von Bernhardi.  See especially Chap.  V, “World-Power or Downfall.”  Other works which may be consulted are Professor J.A.  Cramb’s Germany and England (esp. pp. 111-112) and Professor Usher’s Pan-Germanism.

THE EVILS OF AUTOCRACY

Our inquiry so far has led to two conclusions.  We have discovered by bitter experience that a personal ascendancy, such as the German Emperor wields, is in the highest degree perilous to the interests of peace:  and that a militarism such as that which holds in its thrall the German Empire is an open menace to intellectual culture and to Christian ethics.  But we must not suppose that these conclusions are only true so far as they apply to the Teutonic race, and that the same phenomena observed elsewhere are comparatively innocuous.  Alas! autocracy in any and every country seems to be inimical to the best and highest of social needs, and militarism, wherever found, is the enemy of pacific social development.  Let us take a few instances at haphazard of the danger of the personal factor in European politics.  There is hardly a person to be found nowadays who defends the Crimean war, or indeed thinks that it was in any sense inevitable.  Yet if there was one man more than another whose personal will brought it about, it was—­not Lord Aberdeen who ought to have been responsible—­but Lord Stratford de Redcliffe.  “The great Eltchi,” as he was called, was our Ambassador at Constantinople, a man of uncommon strength of will, which, as is often the case with these powerful natures, not infrequently degenerated into sheer obstinacy.  He had made up his mind that England was to support Turkey and fight with Russia, and inasmuch as Louis Napoleon, for the sake of personal glory, had similar opinions, France as well as England was dragged into a costly and quite useless war.  Napoleon III has already figured among those aspiring monarchs who wish “to sit in the chair of Europe.”  It was his personal will once more which sent the unhappy Maximilian to his death in Mexico, and his personal jealousy of Prussia which launched him in the fatal enterprise “a Berlin” in 1870.  In the latter case we find another personal influence, still more