ade their special German
contribution to the civilised life of the West--a contribution as great and
as unique as that of Renaissance Italy or Elizabethan England. Its people
are very similar in character to their neighbours of kindred stock. As
industrious as the Dutch, as persevering as the Scotch, as steady and
good-hearted as the English, good workers, good citizens, devoted in their
family relations, they have found it easy to live at peace and on a good
understanding with their neighbours, and when they have migrated abroad,
they have by common confession made the best of settlers, both in the
United States and in the British Dominions.

Yet they have developed certain characteristic qualities in their social
and political life, which distinguish them sharply from their western
neighbours. History, which has deprived them, until recently, of a wider
citizenship, has left them timid, docile, dreamy and unpractical in just
that sphere of action where Englishmen have learnt for centuries to think
and to act for themselves. Patriotism with Englishmen is an instinct. We
do not much care to wave flags or make speeches or sing songs about it: we
assume it as the permanent background of our national life and our national
consciousness. With the Germans this is not so. In Germany, partly owing
to German history, partly owing to the constitution of the German mind,
patriotism is not an instinct but an _idea_. Now ideas do not grow up in
men's minds by a natural process. They have to be implanted. The Germans
have needed to be _taught_ to be patriotic. The makers of German patriotism
a century ago were teachers and philosophers. They did not simply appeal to
their patriotic instincts, as Englishmen would have done: they argued the
point and _proved_ that Germany was worth fighting for: they founded a
school of patriotic German philosophy. There are few more curious documents
in history, or more instructive for the light they shed on future
events, than the famous _Speeches to the German Nation_ addressed to his
fellow-countrymen by the philosopher Fichte in 1808, when his country was
under the heel of Napoleon. They are not speeches at all, but philosophical
lucubrations, discussing in abstract terms the whole subject of the nature
of patriotism and of Germany's right to exist as a nation. One argument,
for instance, on which he lays great stress, is that Germany is marked out
to be a great political power because of the pecul