nsibility for
world-problems, can make the Concert of Europe a reality.

Such is the general attitude of mind among the German public of the younger
generation. Let us now turn to the effect of this new outlook upon the
political parties and groupings.

The chief result has been the extinction in Germany, as a political force,
of the great liberal movement of the mid-nineteenth century which in
England, France, and other Western countries has grown and developed during
the last generation along lines corresponding to the needs of the new
century. The younger generation of middle-class Germans, indoctrinated
with "orthodox" and "national" opinions at school and on military service,
eschew the ideals which attracted their fathers and grandfathers in 1848;
and, although so-called "liberal," "free-thinking," and Radical parties
still exist, they have steadily been growing more militarist. Militarism in
its new guise, bound up with ideas of industrial and commercial expansion,
is far more attractive to them than in the form of the Prussian Army. The
Emperor's Navy Bills were from the first more popular in commercial and
industrial circles than with the old Prussian Conservatives. But as the
years went on the Kaiser succeeded in converting both the Junkers to his
Navy Bills and the middle classes to his Army Bills, so that by 1913, when
he demanded the "great national sacrifice" of a levy of 50 million pounds
by a tax, not on income, but on property, there was no difficulty whatever
about "managing" the Reichstag. "The Army Bill of 1913," says Prince Buelow,
"met with such a willing reception from all parties as had never been
accorded to any requisition for armaments on land and sea.... So far as man
can tell, every necessary and justifiable Army and Navy Bill will always be
able to count on a safe Parliamentary majority."[1]

[Footnote 1: _Imperial Germany_, p. 169.]

Prince Buelow's "safe Parliamentary majority" means, of course, a majority
sufficient to outvote the Social Democrats, with whom every German
Government has to reckon as a permanent opposition.

So far we have left the Social Democrats out of the picture. It was
necessary to do this, in discussing German policy and the relation between
the German Government and Reichstag opinion; for the German Government
itself habitually leaves them out of the picture. Hitherto in Germany, so
far as opinion on political questions has mattered at all, it is upper-and
midd