Nevertheless, when the German says he has or loves freedom, what he says is not false.  He means something; and what he means is the second principle, which I may summarise as the Irresponsibility of Thought.  Within the iron framework of the fixed State, the German has not only liberty but anarchy.  Anything can be said although, or rather because, nothing can be done.  Philosophy is really free.  But this practically means only that the prisoner’s cell has become the madman’s cell:  that it is scrawled all over inside with stars and systems, so that it looks like eternity.  This is the contradiction remarked by Dr. Sarolea, in his brilliant book, between the wildness of German theory and the tameness of German practice.  The Germans sterilise thought, making it active with a wild virginity; which can bear no fruit.

But though there are so many mad theories, most of them have one root; and depend upon one assumption.  It matters little whether we call it, with the German Socialists, “the Materialist Theory of History”; or, with Bismarck, “blood and iron.”  It can be put most fairly thus:  that all important events of history are biological, like a change of pasture or the communism of a pack of wolves.  Professors are still tearing their hair in the effort to prove somehow that the Crusaders were migrating for food like swallows; or that the French Revolutionists were somehow only swarming like bees.  This works in two ways often accounted opposite; and explains both the German Socialist and the Junker.  For, first, it fits in with Teutonic Imperialism; making the “blonde beasts” of Germania into lions whose nature it is to eat such lambs as the French.  The highest success of this notion in Europe is marked by praise given to a race famous for its physical firmness and fighting breed, but which has frankly pillaged and scarcely pretended to rule; the Turk, whom some Tories called “the gentleman of Europe.”  The Kaiser paused to adore the Crescent on his way to patronise the Cross.  It was corporately embodied when Greece attempted a solitary adventure against Turkey and was quickly crushed.  That English guns helped to impose the mainly Germanic policy of the Concert upon Crete, cannot be left out of mind while we are making appeals to Greece—­or considering the crimes of England.

But the same principle serves to keep the internal politics of the Germans quiet, and prevent Socialism being the practical hope or peril it has been in so many other countries.  It operates in two ways; first, by a curious fallacy about “the time not being ripe”—­as if time could ever be ripe.  The same savage superstition from the forests had infected Matthew Arnold pretty badly when he made a personality out of the Zeitgeist—­perhaps the only ghost that was ever entirely fabulous.  It is tricked by a biological parallel, by which the chicken always comes out of the egg “at the right time.”  He does not; he comes out when