Of course there is no denying that the Germans are a very distinctive people, as distinctive as the French.  But their distinctions are not diabolical.  Until the middle of the nineteenth century it was the fashion to regard them as a race of philosophical incompetents.  Their reputation as a people of exceptionally military quality sprang up in the weed-bed of human delusions between 1866 and 1872; it will certainly not survive this war.  Their reputation for organisation is another matter.  They are an orderly, industrious, and painstaking people, they have a great respect for science, for formal education, and for authority.  It is their respect for education which has chiefly betrayed them, and made them the instrument of Hohenzollern folly.  Mr. F.M.  Hueffer has shown this quite conclusively in his admirable but ill-named book, “When Blood is Their Argument.”  Their minds have been systematically corrupted by base historical teaching, and the inculcation of a rancid patriotism.  They are a people under the sway of organised suggestion.  This catastrophic war and its preparation have been their chief business for half a century; none the less their peculiar qualities have still been displayed during that period; they have still been able to lead the world in several branches of social organisation and in the methodical development of technical science.  Systems of ideas are perhaps more readily shattered than built up; the aggressive patriotism of many Germans must be already darkened by serious doubts, and I see no inherent impossibility in hoping that the mass of the Germans may be restored to the common sanity of mankind, even in the twenty or thirty years of life that perhaps still remain for me.

Consider the names of the chief exponents of the aggressive German idea, and you will find that not one is German.  The first begetter of Nietzsche’s “blond beast,” and of all that great flood of rubbish about a strange superior race with whitish hair and blue eyes, that has so fatally rotted the German imagination, was a Frenchman named Gobineau.  We British are not altogether free from the disease.  As a small boy I read the History of J.R.  Green, and fed my pride upon the peculiar virtues of my Anglo-Saxon blood. ("Cp.,” as they say in footnotes, Carlyle and Froude.) It was not a German but a renegade Englishman of the Englishman-hating Whig type, Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who carried the Gobineau theory to that delirious level which claims Dante and Leonardo as Germans, and again it was not a German but a British peer, still among us, Lord Redesdale, who in his eulogistic preface to the English translation of Chamberlain’s torrent of folly, hinted not obscurely that the real father of Christ was not the Jew, Joseph, but a much more Germanic person.  Neither Clausewitz, who first impressed upon the German mind the theory of ruthless warfare, nor Bernhardi, nor Treitschke, who did as much to build up the Emperor’s political