Professor Haeckel, another of the witnesses raised up against us, attained to some celebrity at one time through proving the remarkable resemblance between two different things by printing duplicate pictures of the same thing.  Professor Haeckel’s contribution to biology, in this case, was exactly like Professor Harnack’s contribution to ethnology.  Professor Harnack knows what a German is like.  When he wants to imagine what an Englishman is like, he simply photographs the same German over again.  In both cases there is probably sincerity as well as simplicity.  Haeckel was so certain that the species illustrated in embryo really are closely related and linked up, that it seemed to him a small thing to simplify it by mere repetition.  Harnack is so certain that the German and Englishman are almost alike, that he really risks the generalisation that they are exactly alike.  He photographs, so to speak, the same fair and foolish face twice over; and calls it a remarkable resemblance between cousins.  Thus, he can prove the existence of Teutonism just about as conclusively as Haeckel has proved the more tenable proposition of the non-existence of God.

Now the German and the Englishman are not in the least alike—­except in the sense that neither of them are negroes.  They are, in everything good and evil, more unlike than any other two men we can take at random from the great European family.  They are opposite from the roots of their history, nay of their geography.  It is an understatement to call Britain insular.  Britain is not only an island, but an island slashed by the sea till it nearly splits into three islands; and even the Midlands can almost smell the salt.  Germany is a powerful, beautiful and fertile inland country, which can only find the sea by one or two twisted and narrow paths, as people find a subterranean lake.  Thus the British Navy is really national because it is natural; it has cohered out of hundreds of accidental adventures of ships and shipmen before Chaucer’s time and after it.  But the German Navy is an artificial thing; as artificial as a constructed Alp would be in England.  William II. has simply copied the British Navy as Frederick II. copied the French Army:  and this Japanese or ant-like assiduity in imitation is one of the hundred qualities which the Germans have and the English markedly have not.  There are other German superiorities which are very much superior.

The one or two really jolly things that the Germans have got are precisely the things which the English haven’t got:  notably a real habit of popular music and of the ancient songs of the people, not merely spreading from the towns or caught from the professionals.  In this the Germans rather resemble the Welsh; though heaven knows what becomes of Teutonism if they do.  But the difference between the Germans and the English goes deeper than all these signs of it; they differ more than any other two Europeans in the normal posture