tion of tearing away the long-coveted part of her
substance.

Pan-Germanism is by no means a shape of mists, and Germany is anything
but a _Neant_ where thought and effort are likely to lose themselves
without sound or trace. It is a powerful and voracious organisation,
full of unscrupulous self-confidence, whose appetite for aggrandisement
will only be limited by the power of helping itself to the severed
members of its friends and neighbours. The era of wars so eloquently
denounced by the old Republicans as the peculiar blood guilt of dynastic
ambitions is by no means over yet. They will be fought out differently,
with lesser frequency, with an increased bitterness and the savage tooth-
and-claw obstinacy of a struggle for existence. They will make us regret
the time of dynastic ambitions, with their human absurdity moderated by
prudence and even by shame, by the fear of personal responsibility and
the regard paid to certain forms of conventional decency. For, if the
monarchs of Europe have been derided for addressing each other as
"brother" in autograph communications, that relationship was at least as
effective as any form of brotherhood likely to be established between the
rival nations of this continent, which, we are assured on all hands, is
the heritage of democracy. In the ceremonial brotherhood of monarchs the
reality of blood-ties, for what little it is worth, acted often as a drag
on unscrupulous desires of glory or greed. Besides, there was always the
common danger of exasperated peoples, and some respect for each other's
divine right. No leader of a democracy, without other ancestry but the
sudden shout of a multitude, and debarred by the very condition of his
power from even thinking of a direct heir, will have any interest in
calling brother the leader of another democracy--a chief as fatherless
and heirless as himself.

The war of 1870, brought about by the third Napoleon's half-generous,
half-selfish adoption of the principle of nationalities, was the first
war characterised by a special intensity of hate, by a new note in the
tune of an old song for which we may thank the Teutonic thoroughness. Was
it not that excellent bourgeoise, Princess Bismarck (to keep only to
great examples), who was so righteously anxious to see men, women and
children--emphatically the children, too--of the abominable French nation
massacred off the face of the earth? This illustration of the new war-
temper is art