ardts are more efficient only because
more acquisitive than our own Jewish impresarios. The ideas they have
acquired are chiefly Russian or English: and they have profited by the
ideas of Granville Barker and Gordon Craig in order to produce the plays
of Shakespeare and Shaw--(just as industrial Germany profited by the
ideas of Bessemer[70] and Perkins). Germany's claim to artistic
vitality, to genuinely original culture, can be supported only by a
certain distinct excellence in sculpture and caricature, two arts which
often seem to go hand in hand, perhaps because both are based on a
precise simplification of form. But for the activity of a small band of
sculptors and caricaturists centred for the most part in Munich,[71] we
might be content to regard Germany not as a fount of culture but rather
as one of the world's workshops, a well-organised _ergastulum_ for
dealing with the drudgery of modern civilisation, for manipulating
secondary products and extracting derivatives, a large factory for the
production of dictionaries, drugs and electrical machinery.[72]

The extraordinary efficiency of Germany, _as a workshop_, is not due to
any intellectual pre-eminence of the nation as a whole. It is most
clearly and emphatically due to the fact that the German autocracy,
whatever its political iniquity, has had the intelligence and the
national solidarity to choose its business men from among the brains of
the community. In Germany any man of conspicuous intellectual capacity
may be picked out, roughly speaking, and assigned to the direction of a
particular industry. In England we achieve inefficiency by the contrary
process, and are only willing to regard a man as capable and revere him
as an "expert" if he happens to have been occupied exclusively for a
certain number of years in the narrow routine of a particular subject.
This pernicious fallacy of the "Expert" is actually preached in England
as a means to the very Efficiency which in fact it almost invariably
excludes. It is commonly assumed that no man can write a good play
unless he has been a bad actor, or that a retired admiral, quite
incapable of grasping any general idea that was not popular in the Navy
twenty years ago or in the smoking-room of his club, would be better
able to direct the affairs of the Navy than Mr. Winston Churchill or Mr.
Balfour.[73] There is a similar outcry for a government of "Business
Men," although anyone who happens to have heard a couple o