tzsche with his contempt for pity and the gentler virtues, his
admiration for "valour," and his disdain for Christianity.

This explanation is too simple to fit the facts. It may satisfy those who
know no more of Treitschke's brilliant and careful work than the extracts
culled from his occasional writings by General von Bernhardi and the late
Professor Cramb. It may gratify those who, with so many young German
students, forget that Nietzsche, like many other prophets, wrote in
allegory, and that when he spoke of valour he was thinking, not of "shining
armour," but of spiritual conflicts. But careful enquirers, who would
disdain to condemn Macaulay on passages selected by undiscriminating
admirers from his _Essays_, or Carlyle for his frank admiration of Thor
and Odin and the virtues of Valhalla, will ask for a more satisfying
explanation. Even if all that were said about Treitschke and Nietzsche were
true, it would still remain an unsolved question why they and their ideas
should have taken intellectual Germany by storm. But it is not true. What
is true, and what is far more serious, both for Great Britain and for
Europe, is that men like Harnack, Eucken, and Wilamowitz, who would
repudiate all intellectual kinship with Macchiavelli and Nietzsche--men who
are leaders of European thought, and with whom and whose ideas we shall
have to go on living in Europe--publicly support and encourage the policy
and standpoint of a Government which, according to British ideas, has
acted with criminal wickedness and folly, and so totally misunderstood
the conduct and attitude of Great Britain as honestly to regard us as
hypocritically treacherous to the highest interests of civilisation.

That is the real problem; and it is a far more complex and difficult one
than if we had to do with a people which had consciously abandoned the
Christian virtues or consciously embarked on a conspiracy against Belgium
or Great Britain. The utter failure of even the most eminent Germans to
grasp British politics, British institutions, and the British point of
view points to a fundamental misunderstanding, a fundamental divergence
of outlook, between the political ideals of the two countries. It is the
conflict between these ideals which forms the second great issue between
Germany and Great Britain; and on its outcome depends the future of human
civilisation.

Sec.2. _Culture_.--What is the German ideal? What do German thinkers regard
as Germany's