[31] My Life, vol ii, p. 288.
[32] G. Lowes Dickinson, Civilizations of India,
China, and Japan, p.43. See also Eugene Simon,
La Cite Chinoise, passim.
* * * *
*
[The following extracts, mostly from contemporaneous
sources, are gathered together in an Appendix with
the object of throwing side-lights, often from
opposing points of view, on the questions raised
in the text.]
* * * *
*
A NEW AND BETTER PEACE.
“If we now destroy the German national idol,
it must not be to set up an idol of our own in its
place. There will be ruin enough after the war
to repair, and a heavy task for all the nations in
repairing it; but if they have learned then that peace
is not a disguised war but a state of being in which
men and nations alike pursue their own ideas of excellence
without rivalry, then we shall know that the irrevocable
dead have not died in vain.”—"Times”
Literary Supplement, September 17, 1914.
* * * *
*
THE CHANGE FROM THE GERMANY OF KANT AND GOETHE AND
SCHUBERT TO THE GERMANY OF TO-DAY—AND THE
DELUSION OF IMPERIALISM.
“What, then, has wrought this wonderful change
in a people so closely allied to ourselves, whose
race is so similar that their children in the hotels
of France and Italy are mistaken for British children?
The human raw material is the same, and until half
a century ago gave results which won our respect and
admiration. What is this change of the last half-century
which from the same material gives results so different?
There can be only one answer. The old Germany
was a Germany of small, self-governing States, of
small political power; the new Germany is a ‘great’
Germany, with a new ideal and spirit which comes of
victory and military and political power, of the reshaping
of political and social institutions which the retention
of conquered territory demands, its militarization,
regimentation, centralization, and unchallenged authority;
the cultivation of the spirit of domination, the desire
to justify and to frame a philosophy to buttress it.
Some one has spoken of the war which made ’Germany
great and Germans small.’...”
“...So in our day, it is not the German national
faith, the Deutschtum, the belief that the
German national ideal is best for the German—it
is not that belief that is a danger to Europe.
It is a belief that that German national ideal is
the best for all other people, and that the Germans
have a right to impose it by the force of their armies.
It is that belief alone which can be destroyed by armies.
We must show that we do not intend to be brought under
