people who are called pacifists.  They are a peculiarly English type, and they are the most arrogant of all the English.  The idea that they should ever have to fight for their lives is to them supremely absurd.  There must be some mistake, they think, which can be easily remedied once it is pointed out.  Their title to existence is so clear to themselves that they are convinced it will be universally recognized; it must not be made a matter of international conflict.  Partly, no doubt, this belief is fostered by lack of imagination.  The sheltered conditions and leisured life which they enjoy as the parasites of a dominant race have produced in them a false sense of security.  But there is something also of the English strength and obstinacy of character in their self-confidence, and if ever Germany were to conquer England some of them would spring to their full stature as the heroes of an age-long and indomitable resistance.  They are not held in much esteem to-day among their own people; they are useless for the work in hand; and their credit has suffered from the multitude of pretenders who make principle a cover for cowardice.  But for all that, they are kin to the makers of England, and the fact that Germany would never tolerate them for an instant is not without its lesson.

We shall never understand the Germans.  Some of their traits may possibly be explained by their history.  Their passionate devotion to the State, their amazing vulgarity, their worship of mechanism and mechanical efficiency, are explicable in a people who are not strong in individual character, who have suffered much to achieve union, and who have achieved it by subordinating themselves, soul and body, to a brutal taskmaster.  But the convulsions of war have thrown up things that are deeper than these, primaeval things, which, until recently, civilization was believed to have destroyed.  The old monstrous gods who gave their names to the days of the week are alive again in Germany.  The English soldier of to-day goes into action with the cold courage of a man who is prepared to make the best of a bad job.  The German soldier sacrifices himself, in a frenzy of religious exaltation, to the War-God.  The filthiness that the Germans use, their deliberate befouling of all that is elegant and gracious and antique, their spitting into the food that is to be eaten by their prisoners, their defiling with ordure the sacred vessels in the churches—­all these things, too numerous and too monotonous to describe, are not the instinctive coarsenesses of the brute beast; they are a solemn ritual of filth, religiously practised, by officers no less than by men.  The waves of emotional exaltation which from time to time pass over the whole people have the same character, the character of savage religion.