ch has been penned of
to-day's conflict, and certainly one of the most exact analyses of the
German nation made before the world learned, since last August, to
know it as it is--as Sarolea, master delineator of a nation's
character, drew it. Clear, sane, calm, logical, strong--such is Dr.
Sarolea's book, with its "rare perspicacity" and "remarkable sense of
political realities," in the words of King Albert's appreciation of
the work.

Dr. Sarolea, looking at Germany from the British Isles, where he was
writing, perceived that "war is actually unavoidable" unless a
spiritual miracle was wrought; that Europe was "drifting slowly but
steadily toward an awful catastrophe." Why? Because Germany was
strong, envious, ambitious, conceited, arrogant, unscrupulous, and
dissatisfied. It was in Germany that "the pagan gods of the Nibelungen
are forging their deadly weapons," for Germans believe national
superiority is due to military superiority. Dr. Sarolea named as a war
year this very year[2] in which we now are when he said:

[2] 1915.

"Believing, as they do, that to-day they are rich and prosperous
mainly because in 1870 they beat the French people, why should they
not believe and trust that in 1915 they would become even stronger and
richer if they succeeded in beating the English?"

And the conflict, when it comes, will be "a political and religious
crusade," rather than a mere economic war, for the conflict between
England and Germany "is the old conflict between liberalism and
despotism, between industrialism and militarism, between progress and
reaction, between the masses and the classes."

So many other important points are made in Dr. Sarolea's closely
written book, in which practically every sentence contains a fact, an
idea, or a prophecy, that it is not possible in this review to do more
than present a few of them in the summary which follows. Though the
present tense is used by Dr. Sarolea and the reviewer, it should be
constantly remembered that Dr. Sarolea was thinking in 1912, not since
August, 1914.

Germany is in "tragic moral isolation." The moral and intellectual
influence of German culture is steadily diminishing. Other nations
feel a universal distrust and dislike toward Germany. So great is
this antipathy that the Germans imagine there is a malignant
conspiracy against them. An upstart nation, suddenly wealthy and
powerful, Germany has developed an inordinate self-conceit and
self-assertion.