Patriotism and loyalty to hearth and home are passions so strong in humanity that a creed like this, when men are under its influence, is not easily seen to be absurd.  The Saxon boy, whom I saw in his prison camp, probably would not quarrel with it.  And even in the wider world of thought the illusions of nationalism are all-pervading.  I once heard Professor Henry Sidgwick remark that it is not easy for us to understand how the troops of Portugal are stirred to heroic effort when their commanders call on them to remember that they are Portuguese.  He would no doubt have been the first to admit, for he had an alert and sceptical mind, that it is only our stupidity which finds anything comic in such an appeal.  But it is stupidity of this kind which unfits men to deal with other races, and it is stupidity of this kind which has been exalted by the Germans as a primal duty, and has, indeed, been advanced by them as their principal claim to undertake the government of the world.

This extreme nationalism, this unwillingness to feel any sympathy for other peoples, or to show them any consideration, has stupefied and blinded the Germans.  One of the heaviest charges that can be brought against them is that they have seen no virtue in France, I do not ask that they shall interrupt the War to express admiration for their enemies:  I am speaking of the time before the War.  France is the chief modern inheritor of that great Roman civilization which found us painted savages, and made us into citizens of the world.  The French mind, it is admitted, and admitted most readily by the most intelligent men, is quick and delicate and perceptive, surer and clearer in its operation than the average European mind.  Yet the Germans, infatuated with a belief in their own numbers and their own brute strength, have dared to express contempt for the genius of France.  A contempt for foreigners is common enough among the vulgar and unthinking of all nations, but I do not believe that you will find anywhere but in Germany a large number of men trained in the learned professions who are so besotted by vanity as to deny to France her place in the vanguard of civilization.  These louts cannot be informed or argued with; they are interested in no one but themselves, and naked self-assertion is their only idea of political argument.  Treitschke, who was for twenty years Professor of History at Berlin, and who did perhaps more than any other man to build up the modern German creed, has crystallized German politics in a single sentence.  ‘War’, he says, ‘is politics par excellence,’ that is to say, politics at their purest and highest.  Our political doctrine, if it must be put in as brief a form, would be better expressed in the sentence, ‘War is the failure of politics’.