us of France. A contempt for foreigners is
common enough among the vulgar and unthinking of all nations, but I do
not believe that you will find anywhere but in Germany a large number of
men trained in the learned professions who are so besotted by vanity as
to deny to France her place in the vanguard of civilization. These louts
cannot be informed or argued with; they are interested in no one but
themselves, and naked self-assertion is their only idea of political
argument. Treitschke, who was for twenty years Professor of History at
Berlin, and who did perhaps more than any other man to build up the
modern German creed, has crystallized German politics in a single
sentence. 'War', he says, 'is politics _par excellence_,' that is to
say, politics at their purest and highest. Our political doctrine, if it
must be put in as brief a form, would be better expressed in the
sentence, 'War is the failure of politics'.

If England were given over to nationalism as Germany is given over,
then a war between these two Powers, though it would still be a great
dramatic spectacle, would have as little meaning as a duel between two
rival gamebirds in a cockpit. We know, and it will some day dawn on the
Germans, that this War has a deeper meaning than that. We are not
nationalist; we are too deeply experienced in politics to stumble into
that trap. We have had a better and longer political education than has
come to Germany in her short and feverish national life. It is often
said that the Germans are better educated than we are, and in a sense
that is true; they are better furnished with schools and colleges and
the public means of education. The best boy in a school is the boy who
best minds his book, and even if he dutifully believes all that it tells
him, that will not lose him the prize. When he leaves school and
graduates in a wider world, where men must depend on their own judgement
and their own energy, he is often a little disconcerted to find that
some of his less bookish fellows easily outgo him in quickness of
understanding and resource. German education is too elaborate; it
attempts to do for its pupils much that they had better be left to do
for themselves. The pupils are docile and obedient, not troubled with
unruly doubts and questionings, so that the German system of public
education is a system of public mesmerism, and, now that we see it in
its effects, may be truly described as a national disease.

I have said tha