tragic question for Germany to-day is what she can do, not whether it is
right for her to do it. The buffaloes, it must be allowed, had a
perfect right to dominate the prairie of America, till the hunters came.
They moved in herds, they practised shock-tactics, they were violent,
and very cunning. There are but few of them now. A nation of men who
mistake violence for strength, and cunning for wisdom, may conceivably
suffer the fate of the buffaloes and perish without knowing why.

To the English mind the German political doctrine is so incredibly
stupid that for many long years, while men in high authority in the
German Empire, ministers, generals, and professors, expounded that
doctrine at great length and with perfect clearness, hardly any one
could be found in England to take it seriously, or to regard it as
anything but the vapourings of a crazy sect. England knows better now;
the scream of the guns has awakened her. The German doctrine is to be
put to the proof. Who dares to say what the result will be? To predict
certain failure to the German arms is only a kind of boasting. Yet there
are guarded beliefs which a modest man is free to hold till they are
seen to be groundless. The Germans have taken Antwerp; they may possibly
destroy the British fleet, overrun England and France, repel Russia,
establish themselves as the dictators of Europe--in short, fulfil their
dreams. What then? At an immense cost of human suffering they will have
achieved, as it seems to us, a colossal and agonizing failure. Their
engines of destruction will never serve them to create anything so fair
as the civilization of France. Their uneasy jealousy and self-assertion
is a miserable substitute for the old laws of chivalry and regard for
the weak, which they have renounced and forgotten. The will and high
permission of all-ruling Heaven may leave them at large for a time, to
seek evil to others. When they have finished with it, the world will
have to be remade.

We cannot be sure that the Ruler of the world will forbid this. We
cannot even be sure that the destroyers, in the peace that their
destruction will procure for them, may not themselves learn to rebuild.
The Goths, who destroyed the fabric of the Roman Empire, gave their
name, in time, to the greatest mediaeval art. Nature, it is well known,
loves the strong, and gives to them, and to them alone, the chance of
becoming civilized. Are the German people strong enough to earn that
c