[Pg xi]

Can we believe for a moment that the great German intellect has ever been under the slightest misapprehension of so very simple a matter?

War, honest war, may be Hell, as General Sherman described it. It is, at least, a form of Purgatory in which personality, nationality, are forces that count but little, while principle and motive (as was tragically exhibited in the great American struggle) are everything. Did not Christianity itself preach this kind of sanctified discord in which a novel sense of right, or the perception of higher ideal, should divide even the nearest and dearest, and set them at war not, as in old days, by reason of any “family compact,” or mere racial tie, but for the sake of “Right,” and—so far as ordinary friendly or neighbourly relations were concerned—in utter “scorn of consequence.”

There, indeed, is the poignant tragedy of the case. To be at war with the countrymen of Schumann and Beethoven, of Goethe and Ranke, is not that an affliction to the very soul of England, an outrage to feelings and instincts tangled up with the very core of our civilization?

Terrible, indeed, is it that there should be amities which, at such crises, we must

No man or nation expects perfection in his friends. Honestly we have loved and respected the [Pg xii]German. We have not wormed ourselves into his confidence, nursing through long years secret stores of explosive jealousy. His art, his learning, have had their full meed of admiration from his kindred here.

[Pg xii]

But we recognize—dull, indeed, would they be who needed a more striking reminder that beneath the defective “manner” of the Teuton lurks an element of crude barbarity with which we cannot pretend to fraternize.

The violence of the Goths and Huns had its place in history; but that would be a strange international morality which would give the rein now to mediæval instincts of egoistic tyranny and perfectly organized brute force, as against the gentler instincts, the higher social civilization largely associated with the Latin and Celtic races.

In these matters the Balance of Power is no less vital to international life and the evolution of true cosmopolitan ideals than in mere Politics. And if we stand up in battle for the smaller races it is not merely because they are small and need defence, but because an element of the right, a share in the civilization which we mean to 

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