Well might the “Song before Sunrise” again greet the purified France:—­

    Who is this that rises red with wounds and splendid. 
    All her breast and brow made beautiful with scars?

May we soon be able to add the conclusion!—­

    In her eyes the light and fire of long pain ended,
    In her lips a song as of the morning stars.

The prophecy in both parts was fulfilled.  Germany did indeed become united, united not only by closer political ties between all its divisions, but united in its aims and in its methods, conscious of union and of strength, marvellous in its power of organisation, fitting each member into his special position in the consolidated state, and moulding him for the place he was to occupy; drilled from earliest youth how to act and how to think, his commonest acts done, and very gestures made, according to rule.  Yet they, too, had their ideals.  I remember in 1871, the year after the Franco-German War, meeting a party of Germans who were unveiling a tablet by the Pasterze Glacier in memory of a comrade fallen in the war—­Karl Hoffman, a pioneer of mountaineering in the Glockner district—­and hearing their impassioned speeches.  The mountains of Austrian Tyrol were to them “die Alpen seines Vaterlandes,” and the song with the refrain, “Lieb Vaterland muss groesser sein” echoed from the rocks, “My beloved Fatherland must be greater”; may not this be the expression of a noble patriotism?  But it so easily turns to “my country must have more, must take more,” and becomes the very watchword of greed.  “Deutschland ueber Alles” might perhaps mean first to the German “My country before everything to me.” Corruptio optimi pessima, it easily becomes “Germany over all,”—­the country which dominates an inferior world and is thus the condensed motto of supreme insolence.  “Insolence breeds the tyrant,” and the doom the ancient poet prophesies is the divine ordinance to be fulfilled by the action of man.  “Insolence, swollen with vain thought, mounts to the highest place, and is hurled down to the doom decreed.”

Insolence seems the nearest equivalent for the Greek word [Greek:  hybris], which implies much more.  Some translate it “pride.”  It is a sense of superiority, greater strength, higher culture, leading to a claim to dominate the minds and the lives, the destinies, of others, and then in its arrogant self-assertion to override all laws and all restraints imposed by justice.  It is the exact opposite of the Christian precept:  “Let each esteem other better than himself.”  This, like some other Christian precepts, may never have been meant to express the whole truth, but only that side which men are naturally apt to neglect.  It was hardly necessary to insist that men should defend themselves against attack, maintain their rights, and keep their self-respect.  There are some crimes, too, which it required no special revelation to condemn; man revolts from them as contra naturam.  One of these crimes is refusal to aid their fellow-countrymen who are fighting against aggression.