French, and Belgian newspapers."[2] "Our fearless German
warriors," writes the leading German dramatist, Gerhart Hauptmann,[3]
"are _well aware of the reasons for which they have taken the field_. No
illiterates will be found among them. Many of them, besides shouldering
their muskets, carry their Goethe's _Faust_, some work of Schopenhauer, a
Bible, or a Homer in their knapsacks." Such is a serious German writer's
idea of the way in which civilisation is diffused!

[Footnote 1: _Speeches and Lectures_, pp. 147-148 (1913 edition).]

[Footnote 2: Daily Papers, October 12, 1914 (Exchange Telegram from
Rotterdam).]

[Footnote 3: Letter quoted in the _Westminster Gazette._]

With such a philosophy of human progress as this, German thinkers and
statesmen look out into the future and behold nothing but conflict--eternal
conflict between rival national "cultures," each seeking to impose its
domination. "In the struggle between Nationalities," writes Prince
Buelow,[1] in defence of his Polish policy, putting into a cruder form the
philosophy of Wilamowitz, "one nation is the hammer and the other the
anvil; one is the victor and the other the vanquished. It is a law of life
and development in history that where two national civilisations meet they
fight for supremacy."

[Footnote 1: _Imperial Germany_, p. 245 (1st ed.).]

Here we have the necessary and logical result of the philosophy of culture.
In the struggle between cultures no collaboration, no compromise even, is
possible. German is German: Flemish is Flemish: Polish is Polish: French is
French. Who is to decide which is the "more civilised," which is the fitter
to survive? Force alone can settle the issue. A Luther and Goethe may be
the puppets pitted in a contest of culture against Maeterlinck and Victor
Hugo. But it is Krupp and Zeppelin and the War-Lord that pull the strings.
As Wilamowitz reminds us, it was the Roman legions, not Virgil and Horace,
that stamped out the Celtic languages and romanised Western Europe. It is
the German army, two thousand years later, that is to germanise it. It is
an old, old theory; Prussia did not invent it, nor even Rome. "You know as
well as we do," said the Athenians in 416 B.C. to the representatives of
a small people of that day,[1] "that right, as the world goes, is only in
question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the
weak suffer what they must"; and they went on, like the Kaiser, to claim
the