of human greatness. They make this claim so
insistently, and in such obvious good faith, that some few weak tempers
and foolish minds in England have been impressed by it. These
panic-stricken counsellors advise us, without delay, to reform our
institutions and organize them upon the German model. Only thus, they
tell us, can we hold our own against so huge a power. But if we were to
take their advice, we should have nothing of our own left to hold. It is
reasonable and good to co-operate and organize in order to attain an
agreed object, but German organization goes far beyond this. The German
nation is a carefully built, smooth-running machine, with powerful
engines. It has only one fault--that any fool can drive it; and seeing
that the governing class in Germany is obstinate and unimaginative,
there is no lack of drivers to pilot it to disaster. The best ability of
Germany is seen in her military organization. Napoleon is her worshipped
model, and, like many admirers of Napoleon, she thinks only of his great
campaigns; she forgets that he died in St. Helena, and that his schemes
for the reorganization of Europe failed.

I know that many people in England are not daunted but depressed by the
military successes of the enemy. Our soldiers in the field are not
depressed. But we who are kept at home suffer from the miasma of the
back-parlour. We read the headlines of newspapers--a form of literature
that is exciting enough, but does not merit the praise given to
Sophocles, who saw life steadily and saw it whole. We keep our ears to
the telephone, and we forget that the great causes which are always at
work, and which will shape the issues of this war, are not recorded upon
the telephone. There are things truer and more important than the latest
dispatches. Here is one of them. The organization of the second-rate can
never produce anything first-rate. We do not understand a people who,
when it comes to the last push of man against man, throw up their hands
and utter the pathetic cry of 'Kamerad'. To surrender is a weakness that
no one who has not been under modern artillery fire has any right to
condemn; to profess a sudden affection for the advancing enemy is not
weakness but baseness. Or rather, it would be baseness in a voluntary
soldier; in the Germans it means only that the war is not their own war;
that they are fighting as slaves, not as free men. The idea that we
could ever live under the rule of these people is mere