[Footnote 174:  German White Book, pp. 24 et sqq.; see infra Appendix I.]

[Footnote 175:  Correspondence, No. 5.  Sir E. Grey to Sir M. de Bunsen, July 24.]

[Footnote 176:  German White Book, pp. 29 et sqq.; see infra Appendix I.]

[Footnote 177:  Correspondence, No. 64.  Sir R. Rodd to Sir E. Grey, July 28.]

[Footnote 178:  Ibid.  No. 41.  Sir M. de Bunsen to Sir E. Grey, July 27.]

CHAPTER VI

THE NEW GERMAN THEORY OF THE STATE

The war in which England is now engaged with Germany is fundamentally a war between two different principles—­that of raison d’etat, and that of the rule of law.  The antagonism between these two principles appeared in our own internal history as far back as the seventeenth century, when the Stuarts championed the theory of state-necessity and the practice of a prerogative free to act outside and above the law in order to meet the demands of state-necessity, and when Parliament defended the rule of law and sought to include the Crown under that law.  The same antagonism now appears externally in a struggle between two nations, one of which claims a prerogative to act outside and above the public law of Europe in order to secure the ‘safety’ of its own state, while the other stands for the rule of public law.  The one regards international covenants to which it has pledged its own word as ‘scraps of paper’ when they stand in the way of salus populi; the other regards the maintenance of such covenants as a grave and inevitable obligation.

Taught by Treitschke, whom they regard as their great national historian, and whose lectures on Politik have become a gospel, the Germans of to-day assume as an ultimate end and a final standard what they regard as the national German state.[179] ‘The state’, says Treitschke, ’is the highest thing in the external society of man:  above it there is nothing at all in the history of the world.’  There is here no room for comity of nations; for a societas totius humani generis; for international law in any true sense.  What really exists is the exclusive state—­der geschlossene Staat—­and in another sense than that of Fichte.  This state is rigorously national:  it excludes all foreign words from its vocabulary, and it would fain exclude all foreign articles from its shores in order to found a real ‘national’ economy such as List preached.  Further, in the teaching of Treitschke this exclusive state is, ‘as Machiavelli first clearly saw’, essentially power:  der Staat ist Macht.  It may be defined as ’the public might for defence and offence’.  As the highest duty of the individual is self-perfection, the highest duty of the state is self-preservation; and self-preservation means power.  ’To care for its power is the highest moral duty of the state.’  ’Of all political weaknesses