for the great and admirable German
people--though I do not suppose it will matter to them whether one feels
sorry or not! And I look forward to the day when there will come a
better understanding between them and ourselves--better perhaps than has
ever been before--when we shall forgive them their sins against us, and
they will forgive us our sins against them, one of which certainly is
our meanness and shopkeeperiness in rejoicing in the war as a means of
"collaring their trade." I feel sure that the German mass-people will
wake up one day to the knowledge that they have been grossly betrayed at
home, not only by Prussian militarism but by pan-German commercial
philosophy and bunkum, as well as by their own inattention to, and
consequent ignorance of, political affairs. And I hope they will wake up
to the conviction that Destiny and the gods in this matter are after all
bringing them to a conclusion and a consummation far finer than anything
they have perhaps imagined for themselves. If, indeed, when the war is
over, they are fortunate enough to be compelled by the terms of
settlement to abandon their Army and Navy--or _all_ but the merest
residue of these--the consequences undoubtedly will be that, freed from
the frightful burdens which the upkeep of these entails, they will romp
away over the world through an era of unexampled prosperity and
influence. Their science, liberated, will give them the lead in many
arts and industries; their philosophy and literature, no longer crippled
by national vanities, will rise to the splendid world-level of former
days; their colonizing enterprise, unhindered by conscriptionist vetoes,
will carry them far and wide over the globe; and even their trade will
find that without fortified seaports and tariff walls it will, in these
days of universal movement and intercommunication, do fully as well as,
if not much better than, ever it did before. In that day, however, let
us hope that--the more communal conception of public life having
prevailed and come to its own--the success of Trade, among any nation or
people, will no longer mean the successful manufacture of a dominant and
vulgar class, but the real prosperity and welfare of the whole nation,
including all classes.

And in that day, possibly, the other nations, witnessing the
extraordinary prosperity and success of that one which has abandoned
armaments and Kruppisms, will--if they have a grain of sense left in
them--follow suit a