"Look at our achievements
in scholarship and science, at our universities, at our systems of
education, at our literature, our music, and our painting; at our great men
of thought and imagination: at Luther, Duerer, Goethe, Beethoven, Kant."

_Kultur_ then means more than "culture": it means _culture considered as
the most important element in civilisation._ It implies the disciplined
education which alone, in the German view, makes the difference between
the savage and the civilised man. It implies the heritage of intellectual
possessions which, thanks to ordered institutions, a nation is able to hand
down from generation to generation.

We are now beginning to see where the British and German attitudes towards
society and civilisation diverge. Broadly, we may say that the first
difference is that Germany thinks of civilisation in terms of intellect
while we think of it in terms of character. Germany asks, "What do you
know?" "What have you learnt?" and regards our prisoners as uncivilised
because they cannot speak German, and Great Britain as a traitor to
civilisation because she is allied with Russia, a people of ignorant
peasants. We ask, "What have you done?" "What can you do?" and tend
to undervalue the importance of systematic knowledge and intellectual
application.

But we have found no reason as yet for a conflict of ideals. Many English
writers, such as Matthew Arnold, have emphasised the importance of culture
as against character; yet Matthew Arnold's views were widely different from
those of the German professors of to-day. If their sense of the importance
of culture stopped short at this point, we should have much to learn from
Germany, as indeed we have, and no reason to oppose her. What is there then
in the German admiration for culture which involves her in a conflict with
British ideals?

Sec.3. _Culture as a State Product._--The conflict arises out of the alliance
between German culture and the German Government. What British public
opinion resents, in the German attitude, is not culture in itself, about
which it is little concerned, but what we feel to be its unnatural
alliance with military power. It seems to us wicked and hypocritical for a
government which proclaims the doctrine of the "mailed fist" and, like the
ancient Spartans, glories in the perfecting of the machinery of war, to be
at the same time protesting its devotion to culture, and posing as a patron
of the peaceful arts. It is the