oans.

Yes, the agony and bloody sweat of battlefields endured for the
domination or the ambition of a class is appalling. But in many cases,
though more dramatic and appealing to the imagination, one may doubt if
it is worse than the year-long and age-long agony of daily life endured
for the same reason.

Maeterlinck, in his eloquent and fiery letter to the _Daily Mail_ of
September 14th, maintained that the whole German nation is equally to
blame in this affair--that all classes are equally involved in it, with
no _degrees_ of guilt. We may excuse the warmth of personal feeling
which makes him say this, but we cannot accept the view. We are bound to
point out that it is only by some such analysis as the above, and
estimation of the method by which the delusions of one class may be
communicated to the others, that we can guard ourselves, too, from
falling into similar delusions.

I mentioned that besides the growth of the commercial class, a second
great cause of the war was the political ignorance of the German people.
And this is important. Fifty years ago, and before that, when Germany
was divided up into scores of small States and Duchies, the mass of its
people had no practical interest in politics. Such politics as existed,
as between one Duchy and another, were mere teacup politics. Read
Eckermann's _Conversations_, and see how small a part they played in
Goethe's mind. That may have been an advantage in one way. The brains of
the nation went into science, literature, music. And when, after 1870,
the unification of Germany came, and the political leadership passed
over to Prussia, the same state of affairs for a long time continued;
the professors continued their investigations in the matters of the
thyroid gland or the rock inscriptions in the Isle of Thera, but they
left the internal regulation of the State and its foreign policy
confidently in the hands of the Kaiser and the nominees of the great
and rising _bourgeoisie_, and themselves remained unobservant and
uninstructed in such matters. It was only when these latter powers
declared--as in the Emperor's pan-German proclamation of 1896--that a
Teutonic world-empire was about to be formed, and that the study of
_Welt-politik_ was the duty of every serious German, that the thinking
and reading portion of the population suddenly turned its attention to
this subject. An immense mass of political writings--pamphlets,
prophecies, military and economic treatise