in not seeing that Russia, rebuffed in 1908 over Bosnia and Herzegovina, would never put up with a second insult of the same kind over Servia.  The same Government was strangely unable to perceive that whatever it might tactically gain by the invasion and devastation of Belgium would be more than lost by the moral effect of such action on the whole world; and notwithstanding its army of spies, it had not the sense to see that England, whether morally bound to or not, was certain, at all costs, to fight in defence of Belgium’s neutrality.  So true it is that without the understanding which comes from the heart, all the paraphernalia of science and learning and the material results of organization and discipline are of little good.

But however we choose to apportion the blame or at least the responsibility for the situation among the various Governments concerned, the main point and the main lesson of it all is to see that any such apportionment does not much matter!  As long as our Governments are constructed as they are—­that is, on the principle of representing, not the real masses of their respective peoples, but the interests of certain classes, especially the commercial, financial, and military classes—­so long will such wars be inevitable.  The real blame rests, not with the particular Foreign policy of this or that country but with the fact that Europe, already rising through her mass-peoples into a far finer and more human and spiritual life than of old, still lies bound in the chains of an almost Feudal social order.

When the great German mass-peoples find this out, when they discover the little rift in the lute which now separates their real quality from the false standards of their own dominant military and commercial folk, then their true role in the world will begin, and a glorious role it will be.

FOOTNOTES: 

[13] “A German,” he said, “could not live long in the atmosphere of England—­an atmosphere of sham, prudery, conventionality, and hollowness”!  See article on “Treitschke,” by W.H.  Dawson, in the Nineteenth Century for January 1915.

[14] The influence, however, of Bernhardi in his own country has been somewhat exaggerated in England.

[15] It seems that the same remark is made about the Germans in the U.S.A., that they take little interest in politics there.

[16] This attitude is exactly corroborated by Herr Maximilian Harden’s manifesto, originally published in Die Zukunft, and lately reprinted in the New York Times.

[17] Though this is only, perhaps, true of their State colonies.  In their individual and missionary colonizing groups, and as pioneer settlers, they seem to have succeeded well.

VI

THE HEALING OF, NATIONS[18]