thus supreme whenever we were united or even nearly united lay in the fact, which must be patent to every observer, that our mental, moral, and physical characteristics render us superior to all rivals.  The German or Teutonic race can everywhere achieve, other things being equal, more than can any other race.  Witness the conquest of the Roman Empire by German tribes; the political genius, commercial success, and final colonial expansion of the English, a Teutonic people; and the peculiar strength of the German races resident within their old homes on the Rhine, the Danube, the Weser, and the Elbe, whenever they were not fatally disunited by domestic quarrel or unwise foreign ideals.  It was we who revivified the declining society of Roman Gaul, and made it into the vigorous mediaeval France that was ruled from the North.  It was we who made and conquered the heathen Slavs threatening Europe from the East, and who civilized them so far as they could be civilized.  We are, in a word, and that patently not only to ourselves but to all others, the superior and leading race of mankind; and you have but to contrast us with the unstable Celt—­who has never produced a State—­the corrupt and now hopelessly mongrel Mediterranean or ‘Latin’ stock, the barbarous and disorderly Slav, to perceive at once the truth of all we say.

[Illustration:  Sketch 1.]

“It so happens that the various accidents which interrupted our strivings for unity permitted other national groups, inferior morally and physically to our own, to play a greater part than such an inferiority warranted; and the same accidents permitted men of Teutonic stock, not inhabiting the ancient homes of the Teutons, but emigrated therefrom and politically separated from the German Empire, to obtain advantages in which we ourselves should have had a share, but which we missed.  Thus England, a Teutonic country, obtained her vast colonial empire while we had not a ship upon the sea.

“France, a nation then healthier than it is now, but still of much baser stock than our own, played for centuries the leading part in Western Europe; she is even to-day ‘over-capitalized,’ as it were, possessing a far greater hold over the modern world than her real strength warrants.  Even the savage Slavs have profited by our former disunion, and the Russian autocracy not only rules millions of German-speaking subjects, but threatens our frontiers with its great numbers of barbarians, and exercises over the Balkan Peninsula, and therefore over the all-important position of Constantinople, a power very dangerous to European culture as a whole, and particularly to our own culture—­which is, of course, by far the highest culture of all.

“Some fifty years ago, acting upon the impulse of a group of great writers and thinkers, our statesmen at last achieved that German unity which had been the unrealized ideal of so many centuries.  In a series of wars we accomplished that unity, and we amply manifested our superiority when we were once united by defeating with the greatest ease and in the most fundamental fashion the French, whom the rest of Europe then conceived to be the chief military power.