even as it was a marked trait of
the Roman people, and which is perhaps characteristic of all nations
who are pre-eminent in action, in colonization and empire-building.
This disbelief partly explains why we have revealed such strange
impotence in fighting our spiritual battles. Our Churches have
remained silent and inarticulate. Our statesmen have seldom risen
above sentimental platitudes. No trumpet voice has vindicated our
ideas to the world. Our writers, with a few notable exceptions, such
as Mr. Gilbert Chesterton and Mr. Wells, have seldom risen above trite
truisms. This war has not even produced a masterpiece such as Burke's
"Thoughts on the French Revolution."

But our incomprehension is due even more to our ignorance of the
strange and devious workings of the German mind. Even to-day few
authors understand the reasons which render the German people so
responsive and so docile to the most extravagant doctrines and
systems. The British are a political people; and a political people
only accepts theories in so far as they can be verified, interpreted,
and corrected by experience, only in so far as they can be tested by
the fire of discussion. The German people, as even Prince von Buelow is
compelled to admit, have remained an essentially unpolitical people. They
still are under the yoke of countless princelings. There still exist
sovereign potentates of Lippe and Waldeck, of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen
and Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt. The Germans have acquired none of the
habits and traditions of free government. But, most important of all,
their religion has acted in the same direction as their politics. They
are described by Treitschke as the typical Protestant nation; but the
misfortune of German Protestantism has been that it has never
"protested." Through the fusion and confusion of Church and State the
Germans have sold their spiritual birthright for a mess of pottage.
Their spiritual life has been almost entirely divorced from action. It
has been centred in the intellect and in the emotions. It has moved in
a world of abstraction and dreams.

And thus both their politics and their religion have made them a prey
to visionaries and sentimentalists, to unscrupulous journalists like
Harden and Reventlow, to unbalanced poets like Nietzsche, to political
professors, and to fanatic doctrinaires. Of those academic politicians
and fanatic doctrinaires, Treitschke has probably been the most
dangerous and the most illustr