perors of the
Middle Ages. Whenever it has thus been nearly achieved, we Germans
have easily proved ourselves the masters of other societies around us.
Most unfortunately our very strength has proved our ruin time and
again by leading us into adventures, particularly adventures in
Italy, which took the place of our national ideal for unity and
disturbed and swamped it. The reason we have been thus supreme
whenever we were united or even nearly united lay in the fact, which
must be patent to every observer, that our mental, moral, and
physical characteristics render us superior to all rivals. The German
or Teutonic race can everywhere achieve, other things being equal,
more than can any other race. Witness the conquest of the Roman Empire
by German tribes; the political genius, commercial success, and final
colonial expansion of the English, a Teutonic people; and the peculiar
strength of the German races resident within their old homes on the
Rhine, the Danube, the Weser, and the Elbe, whenever they were not
fatally disunited by domestic quarrel or unwise foreign ideals. It was
we who revivified the declining society of Roman Gaul, and made it
into the vigorous mediaeval France that was ruled from the North. It
was we who made and conquered the heathen Slavs threatening Europe
from the East, and who civilized them so far as they could be
civilized. We are, in a word, and that patently not only to ourselves
but to all others, the superior and leading race of mankind; and you
have but to contrast us with the unstable Celt--who has never produced
a State--the corrupt and now hopelessly mongrel Mediterranean or
'Latin' stock, the barbarous and disorderly Slav, to perceive at once
the truth of all we say.

[Illustration: Sketch 1.]

"It so happens that the various accidents which interrupted our
strivings for unity permitted other national groups, inferior morally
and physically to our own, to play a greater part than such an
inferiority warranted; and the same accidents permitted men of
Teutonic stock, not inhabiting the ancient homes of the Teutons, but
emigrated therefrom and politically separated from the German Empire,
to obtain advantages in which we ourselves should have had a share,
but which we missed. Thus England, a Teutonic country, obtained her
vast colonial empire while we had not a ship upon the sea.

"France, a nation then healthier than it is now, but still of much
baser stock than our own, played for ce