But apart from the hellish irony of this humanitarian idea, the question it raises is really one of solid importance for people whose politics are more or less like ours.  There is a very urgent point in that question, “Against whom would the Belgian workmen be protected by the German laws?” And if we pursue it, we shall be enabled to analyse something of that poison—­very largely a Prussian poison—­which has long been working in our own commonwealth, to the enslavement of the weak and the secret strengthening of the strong.  For the Prussian armies are, pre-eminently, the advance guard of the Servile State.  I say this scientifically, and quite apart from passion or even from preference.  I have no illusions about either Belgium or England.  Both have been stained with the soot of Capitalism and blinded with the smoke of mere Colonial ambition; both have been caught at a disadvantage in such modern dirt and disorder; both have come out much better than I should have expected countries so modern and so industrial to do.  But in England and Belgium there is Capitalism mixed up with a great many other things, strong things and things that pursue other aims; Clericalism, for instance, and militant Socialism in Belgium; Trades Unionism and sport and the remains of real aristocracy in England.  But Prussia is Capitalism; that is, a gradually solidifying slavery; and that majestic unity with which she moves, dragging all the dumb Germanies after her, is due to the fact that her Servile State is complete, while ours is incomplete.  There are not mutinies; there are not even mockeries; the voice of national self-criticism has been extinguished forever.  For this people is already permanently cloven into a higher and a lower class:  in its industry as much as its army.  Its employers are, in the strictest and most sinister sense, captains of industry.  Its proletariat is, in the truest and most pitiable sense, an army of labour.  In that atmosphere masters bear upon them the signs that they are more than men; and to insult an officer is death.

If anyone ask how this extreme and unmistakable subordination of the employed to the employers is brought about, we all know the answer.  It is brought about by hunger and hardness of heart, accelerated by a certain kind of legislation, of which we have had a good deal lately in England, but which was almost invariably borrowed from Prussia.  Mr. Herbert Samuel’s suggestion that the poor should be able to put their money in little boxes and not be able to get it out again is a sort of standing symbol of all the rest.  I have forgotten how the poor were going to benefit eventually by what is for them indistinguishable from dropping sixpence down a drain.  Perhaps they were going to get it back some day; perhaps when they could produce a hundred coupons out of the Daily Citizen; perhaps when they got their hair cut; perhaps when they consented to be inoculated, or trepanned, or circumcised, or something.  Germany is full of this sort of legislation; and if you asked an innocent German, who honestly believed in it, what it was, he would answer that it was for the protection of workmen.