PREFACE

Might is right
  First published as one of the Oxford Pamphlets,
  October 1914.

The war of ideas
  An Address to the Royal Colonial Institute,
  December 12, 1916.

The faith of England
  An Address to the Union Society of University
  College, London, March 22, 1917.

Some gains of the war
  An Address to the Royal Colonial Institute,
  February 13, 1918.

The war and the press
  A Paper read to the Essay Society, Eton College,
  March 14, 1918.

Shakespeare and England
  The Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British
  Academy, delivered July 4, 1918.

PREFACE

This book was not planned, but grew out of the troubles of the time.  When, on one occasion or another, I was invited to lecture, I did not find, with Milton’s Satan, that the mind is its own place; I could speak only of what I was thinking of, and my mind was fixed on the War.  I am unacquainted with military science, so my treatment of the War was limited to an estimate of the characters of the antagonists.

The character of Germany and the Germans is a riddle.  I have seen no convincing solution of it by any Englishman, and hardly any confident attempt at a solution which did not speak the uncontrolled language of passion.  There is the same difficulty with the lower animals; our description of them tends to be a description of nothing but our own loves and hates.  Who has ever fathomed the mind of a rhinoceros; or has remembered, while he faces the beast, that a good rhinoceros is a pleasant member of the community in which his life is passed?  We see only the folded hide, the horn, and the angry little eye.  We know that he is strong and cunning, and that his desires and instincts are inconsistent with our welfare.  Yet a rhinoceros is a simpler creature than a German, and does not trouble our thought by conforming, on occasion, to civilized standards and humane conditions.

It seems unreasonable to lay great stress on racial differences.  The insuperable barrier that divides England from Germany has grown out of circumstance and habit and thought.  For many hundreds of years the German peoples have stood to arms in their own defence against the encroachments of successive empires; and modern Germany learned the doctrine of the omnipotence of force by prolonged suffering at the hands of the greatest master of that immoral school—­the Emperor Napoleon.  No German can understand the attitude of disinterested patronage which the English mind quite naturally assumes when it is brought into contact with foreigners.  The best example of this superiority of attitude is to be seen in the