ds backward races has been illustrated by the ruthless
massacre of the Hereros; whose attitude towards ancient but
disorganised civilisations has been illustrated by the history of
Kiao-chau and by the celebrated allocution of the Kaiser to his
soldiers on the eve of the Boxer expedition, when he bade them outdo
the ferocity of Attila and his Huns; whose attitude towards kindred
civilisations on the same level as their own has been illustrated
before the war in the treatment of Danes, Poles, and Alsatians, and
during the war in the treatment of Belgium, of the occupied districts
in France, of Poland and of Serbia. The world would have lain at the
mercy of an insolent and ruthless tyranny, the tyranny of a Kultur
whose ideal is the uniformity of a perfect mechanism, not the variety
of life. Such a fate humanity could not long have tolerated; yet before
the iron mechanism could have been shattered, if once it had been
established, there must have been inconceivable suffering, and
civilisation must have fallen back many stages towards barbarism. From
this fate, we may perhaps claim, the world was saved from the moment
when not Britain only, but the British Empire, refused to await its
turn according to the German plan, threw its whole weight into the
scale, and showed that, though not organised for war, it was not the
effete and decadent power, not the fortuitous combination of discordant
and incoherent elements, which German theory had supposed; but that
Freedom can create a unity and a virile strength capable of
withstanding even the most rigid discipline, capable of enduring defeat
and disappointment undismayed; but incapable of yielding to the
insolence of brute force.

It is still possible that the war may end in what is called an
inconclusive peace; and as it is certain that of all her unrighteous
gains that to which Germany will most desperately cling will be her
domination over the Austrian and Turkish Empires, with the prospect
which it affords of a later and more fortunate attempt at world-power,
an inconclusive peace would mean that the whole world would live in
constant dread of a renewal of these agonies and horrors in a still
more awful form. What the effect of this would be upon the
extra-European dominions of powers which would be drained of their
manhood and loaded with the burden of the past war and the burden of
preparation for the coming war, it is beyond our power to imagine. But
it seems likely that