ly
essential need for the coming time is a free play for men of initiative
and imagination. Is Germany to her utmost possibility making capable
men? That, after all, is the vital question, and not whether her policy
is wise or foolish, or her commercial development inflated or sound. Or
is Germany doing no more than cash the promises of those earlier days?

After all, I do not see that she is in a greatly stronger position than
was France in the early sixties, and, indeed, in many respects her
present predominance is curiously analogous to that of the French Empire
in those years. Death at any time may end the career of the present
ruler of Germany--there is no certain insurance of one single life. This
withdrawal would leave Germany organized entirely with reference to a
Court, and there is no trustworthy guarantee that the succeeding Royal
Personality may not be something infinitely more vain and aggressive, or
something weakly self-indulgent or unpatriotic and morally indifferent.
Much has been done in the past of Germany, the infinitely less exacting
past, by means of the tutor, the Chamberlain, the Chancellor, the
wide-seeing power beyond the throne, who very unselfishly intrigues his
monarch in the way that he should go. But that sort of thing is
remarkably like writing a letter by means of a pen held in lazy tongs
instead of the hand. A very easily imagined series of accidents may
place the destinies of Germany in such lazy tongs again. When that
occasion comes, will the new class of capable men on which we have
convinced ourselves in these anticipations the future depends--will it
be ready for its enlarged responsibilities, or will the flower of its
possible members be in prison for _lese majeste_, or naturalized
Englishmen or naturalized Americans or troublesome privates under
officers of indisputably aristocratic birth, or well-broken labourers,
won "back to the land," under the auspices of an Agrarian League?

In another way the intensely monarchical and aristocratic organization
of the German Empire will stand in the way of the political synthesis of
greater Germany. Indispensable factors in that synthesis will be Holland
and Switzerland--little, advantageously situated peoples, saturated with
ideas of personal freedom. One can imagine a German Swiss, at any rate,
merging himself in a great Pan-Germanic republican state, but to bow the
knee to the luridly decorated God of His Imperial Majesty's Fathers will