If England were given over to nationalism as Germany is given over, then a war between these two Powers, though it would still be a great dramatic spectacle, would have as little meaning as a duel between two rival gamebirds in a cockpit.  We know, and it will some day dawn on the Germans, that this War has a deeper meaning than that.  We are not nationalist; we are too deeply experienced in politics to stumble into that trap.  We have had a better and longer political education than has come to Germany in her short and feverish national life.  It is often said that the Germans are better educated than we are, and in a sense that is true; they are better furnished with schools and colleges and the public means of education.  The best boy in a school is the boy who best minds his book, and even if he dutifully believes all that it tells him, that will not lose him the prize.  When he leaves school and graduates in a wider world, where men must depend on their own judgement and their own energy, he is often a little disconcerted to find that some of his less bookish fellows easily outgo him in quickness of understanding and resource.  German education is too elaborate; it attempts to do for its pupils much that they had better be left to do for themselves.  The pupils are docile and obedient, not troubled with unruly doubts and questionings, so that the German system of public education is a system of public mesmerism, and, now that we see it in its effects, may be truly described as a national disease.

I have said that England is not nationalist.  If the English believed in England as the Germans believe in Germany, there would be nothing for it but a duel to the death, the extinction of one people or the other, and darkness as the burier of the dead.  Peace would be attained by a great simplification and impoverishment of the world.  But the English do not believe in themselves in that mad-bull fashion.  They come of mixed blood, and have been accustomed for many long centuries to settle their differences by compromise and mutual accommodation.  They do not inquire too curiously into a man’s descent if he shares their ideas.  They have shown again and again that they prefer a tolerant and intelligent foreigner to rule over them rather than an obstinate and wrong-headed man of native origin.  The earliest strong union of the various parts of England was achieved by William the Norman, a man of French and Scandinavian descent.  Our native-born king, Charles the First, was put to death by his people; his son, James the Second, was banished, and the Dutchman, William the Third, who had proved himself a statesman and soldier of genius in his opposition to Louis the Fourteenth, was elected to the throne of England.  The fierce struggles of the seventeenth century, between Royalists and Parliamentarians, between Cavaliers and Puritans, were settled at last, not by the destruction of either party, but by the stereotyping of the dispute in the