by the idea of culture, expected
the break-up of the British Empire. They could imagine Indians giving their
lives for India, Boers for a Dutch South Africa, Irishmen for Ireland
or Ulstermen for Ulster; but the deeper moral appeal which has thrilled
through the whole Empire, down to its remotest island dependency, lay
beyond their ken.

Let us look a little more closely at the German idea of national culture
rather than national character as the chief element in civilisation. We
shall see that it is directly contrary to the ideals which inspire
and sustain the British Commonwealth, and practically prohibits that
association of races and peoples at varying levels of social progress which
is its peculiar task.

"Culture," in the German idea, is the justification of a nation's
existence. Nationality has no other claim. Goethe, Luther, Kant, and
Beethoven are Germany's title-deeds. A nation without a culture has no
right to a "place in the sun." "History," says Wilamowitz in a lecture
delivered in 1898, "knows nothing of any right to exist on the part of a
people or a language without a culture. If a people becomes dependent on a
foreign culture" (_i.e._ in the German idea, on a foreign civilisation) "it
matters little if its lower classes speak a different language: they, too
... must eventually go over to the dominant language.... Wisely to further
this necessary organic process is a blessing to all parties; violent
haste will only curb it and cause reactions. Importunate insistence on
Nationality has never anywhere brought true vitality into being, and often
destroyed vitality; but the superior Culture which, sure of its inner
strength, throws her doors wide open, can win men's hearts."[1] In the
light of a passage like this, from the most distinguished representative of
German humanism, it is easier to grasp the failure of educated Germany to
understand the sequel of the South African War, or the aspirations of the
Slav peoples, or to stigmatise the folly of their statesmen in Poland,
Denmark, Alsace-Lorraine, and Belgium. "Importunate insistence on
Nationality"--the words come home to us now with a new meaning when we
learn that in Belgium, now perforce "dependent on a foreign culture,"
babies are registered under German names and newspapers printed in "the
dominant language," and that already "forty newspaper vendors in Brussels
have been sentenced to long terms of hard labour in German prisons for
selling English,