serious dissension from the foreign policy of the Empire. A political opposition, like that familiar to us in England, has never existed in Germany. The reason is simple in Germany ministerial responsibility and parliamentary control are a shadow, not a reality. If we press the question farther back and ask why this is so, the answer is that in Germany there is no public qualified by training and experience for participation in constitutional government. As in matters of speculation, so in politics, there is little intelligent public opinion outside the charmed circle of official experts. The government never really breathes the healthy atmosphere of public criticism. The German carries with him into politics his national instinct of obedience. If he airs his grievances, it is as an outside critic; he is not responsible and does not want to be. Hence his readiness to place himself unreservedly in the expert's hands, and, like a sick man consulting his doctor, to rely with blind trust on the man who knows. Hear Bismarck's opinion of the members of the Prussian Parliament in the sixties:

'These chatterers really cannot govern Prussia. I must bring some opposition to bear against them; they have too little wit and too much self-complacency-stupid and audacious. Stupid, in all its meanings, is not the right word; considered individually, these people are sometimes very clever, generally educated-the regulation German university culture; but of politics, beyond the interests of their own church tower, they know as little as we knew as students, and even less; as far as external politics go, they are also, taken separately, like children. In all other questions they become childish as soon as they stand together in corpore. In the mass stupid, individually intelligent.'

A people of this habit of mind is dangerous equally in defeat and in success. If the government lands them in disaster, public confidence is shattered and the issue is panic and revolution. Such, for example, may prove to be the outcome of a victory of the Allies in the present war. The inability of the German to preserve his balance in times of prosperity is clearly evidenced in the period that followed the crowning victory of 1870. It is true that the full effects of victory on the morale of the nation were not immediately manifest. The first need of Germany was for recuperation, and so long as Bismarck held the helm of the Empire her policy was one of peace. The men who had fought three wars for German unity and had seen their efforts crowned by the

installation of the Prussian King as German Emperor, were not likely to forge new projects of national aggression. For them the German army was the strong shield, under whose protection the German people could digest the fruits of victory and develop their resources undisturbed. It was far otherwise with the generation which grew to manhood in enjoyment of material prosperity, in a time of industrial and commercial expansion, with the triumphs of 1870 to remind them that the Prussian army was invincible, but without the salutary experience of the efforts by which those triumphs had been secured. These were the men who had sat at Treitschke's feet and heard from his lips the proud story of Prussia's greatness. Bismarck's fall from power in the spring of 1890 marked the moment when their star rose to the ascendant. In the next two decades a wave of overweening self-confidence swept over Germany. The self-complacency and childishness, which Bismarck had noted many years before, beguiled her people along the pathway of illusion. Legitimate national aspirations gradually yielded place to the dream of a European hegemony, of a Germany which should stand to other nations as Prussia stood to the component members of the Empire. The victories won by Prussian soldiers and Prussian statesmen were construed into victories of German culture. The Germans were the chosen people, and their mission was to impose the blessings of their culture upon all mankind.

Such was the genesis of the gospel of modern Germany. There is nothing unusual in its history. It is but a fresh instance of the old story, that has ever constituted a great part of the tragedy of life, the story of moral infatuation. How often has not the achievement of legitimate ambition in politics, art, or commerce given birth to the temper of pride and self-aggrandisement! Our homely English phrases, his 'head was turned,' 'he was spoiled by success,' point to the frequency of this catastrophe. It is with peoples as with individuals. We are told of Bishop Butler that he was found meditating in his garden at Bristol on the problem whether nations could go mad as well as individuals. The idea might seem a paradox to so individualist and unhistorical an age as was the eighteenth century. Since Butler's day, the drama of the French Revolution, not to mention that of modern Germany, has proved this idea to be no paradox, but literal truth.

The history of ancient Greece affords an analogy still better suited to our purpose. We have all learnt how Athens, within a generation of her championship of Hellenic freedom against Persia, was mastered by the thirst for empire and strove to subject Hellas to Athenian hegemony. The claims of German culture are incommensurable with those of Athens, yet the maxims of German policy, the principles on which she defends her claim to power, are the same. The words of the Athenian

envoys to Melos as recorded by Thucydides, or those with which Callicles in Plato's Gorgias advocates against Socrates the doctrine that Might is Right, strike the same note as Treitschke's lectures on Politik. Their logic is the logic of Germany to-day in the enslavement of Belgium and Serbia. The word Hubris-üßpıs—is familiar to all students of the classics; but there can be few for whom the present war has not given it a clearer meaning. The Greeks signified by it the insatiable desire for power which drives a man or a nation headlong, as though possessed by a demon, to unbridled selfassertion. To this blinding passion, knowing neither bound nor reason, trampling alike on personal liberty and public law, they opposed the virtue of Sophrosyne, i.e. soundness of mind, the clear vision, born of self-knowledge and self-control, that enables an individual or nation, in the plenitude of power, to act with a balanced judgment. Where this saving wisdom is lacking, Hubris lures in a frenzy of self-confidence to destruction. An ancient Hubris ever breeds a fresh and 'active Hubris to add to the woes of man.'

φιλεῖ δὲ τίκτειν ὕβρις

μὲν παλαιὰ νεά

ζουσαν ἐν κακοῖς βροτῶν
ὕβριν. . .

The same idea is expressed in the 'Antigone' of Sophocles:

'And through the future, near and far, as through the past, shall this law hold good: Nothing that is vast enters into the life of mortals without a curse.

'For that hope whose wanderings are so wide is to many men a comfort, but to many a false lure of giddy desires; and the disappointment comes on one who knoweth nought till he burn his foot against the hot fire.

Aeschylus, 'Agamemnon.'

can detect symptoms of deterioration. Their labours in the aggregation of data and results have become increasingly mechanical. Less judgment is shown than heretofore in the selection of material for inquiry and publication. If we peruse the innumerable learned periodicals in the various departments of knowledge issued month by month in Germany, we find that much of their contents is of a stamp which no serious scholar in this country would dream of giving to the world. The German mind appears to be losing its power of discriminating between quantity and quality of output, between mediocrity and excellence of achievement. Moreover, the mind-power of the nation has of recent years been increasingly concentrated on the applications of science to problems of material well-being. Humane learning, whether in history, philology, or pure science, is still held in honour; but the centre of gravity of the German intellect has shifted elsewhere, to the furtherance of industrial and commercial enterprise. The mind of the nation has been gradually materialised to serve the purposes of national economy.

It is no mere coincidence that this absorption synchronises with the alliance between German culture and the German State. We have been told recently by Dr. Sadler that there has been a growing tendency of late years for the German Government to control the character of the professorial teaching in the German Universities. The scholar is content to treat the problems of practical politics as the close preserve of the official classes. It is for the latter to determine the course of national policy; his province is to mind his own business and not to meddle in affairs of State. Hence the absence of intelligent criticism on the policy of the government and the readiness of the professoriate to accept direction from the State.

The culture of Germany to-day presents indeed features analogous to those which prevailed in Europe when the Middle Ages were drawing to a close. We are confronted with a modern form of scholasticism in knowledge. Then, as now, learning was the monopoly of experts, and the outside public was debarred from participation and criticism. Then, as now, scholars busied themselves with the minutiae of their science, and ignored the great speculative problems which have a living interest for the world. Then, as now, thought was

subjected to authority, and heresy suffered persecution. It matters little that the instruments of repression are changed; that orthodoxy relies not on the thumbscrew and the stake, but on political prosecution and the exercise of official patronage. Freedom of thought is equally menaced; it may even be doubted whether the substitution of secular for ecclesiastical authority is wholly a gain to modern Germany. The Medieval Church had behind it traditions of unique significance for the human spirit. The Prussian State can point to no such hallowed antecedents; its record is not of martyrdom and sacrifice, but of the conquest of Silesia, the partition of Poland, the spoliation of Denmark and France, and the rape of Belgium and Serbia.

These reflections show how well-grounded was Nietzsche's foreboding that the victory of 1870 would prove in the event a signal defeat for German culture. Germany has forfeited her title to respect among the nations because she has been untrue to her high vocation. Her ambition to force a German culture upon the free peoples of the world is doomed by inherent contradiction. Catholicity is of the essence of truth: truth knows no national limitations. Sic vos, non vobis has been the note of intellectual progress in every age. To win knowledge, not for themselves, but for the world, was the goal of German thinkers in the past, and the world honours them for their service. The Germans of to-day have forsaken the truth of their fathers-forsaken a truth that is universal and for all mankind for a truth that is national and German, in other words, a truth that is no truth at all. It may be that, through defeat and disillusionment, they will gain the saving insight which alone enables a people to enrich the spiritual heritage of the world. But at present the promise of enrichment lies elsewhere. We turn from the tragedy of the German intellect to France, whose historic culture, compared with which that of Germany is but of yesterday, has ever been consecrated to the service of humanity; and to Russia, whose claim to labour in the same cause has found utterance in these noble words of Dostoieffsky :

'The significance of the Russian race is without doubt European and Universal. To be a real Russian and to be wholly Russian means but this: to be the brother of all men, to be universally human. To the true Russian, Europe and the affairs of the great