demands an “Elizabethan age” of her own is the tragic platitude of our time.

That she is aggrieved that we have had one, while we can only imperfectly (in her estimation) utilize its modern fruits, is her true theoretical casus belli against us.

The immorality of the position consists in her belief that the Sun of Civilization must stand still, the currents of Law and Order run backwards to satisfy her entêtée and unscrupulous jealousy. Englishmen have been so innocent as to believe she would be satisfied by a share, nay an extensive monopoly of the trade we once thought our own. They have urged that the German has all the advantages enjoyed by a native throughout the British Empire, that in spite of a constant agitation by a large and powerful party, no English Government has ever used its power to impose any artificial restraints upon German trade; that[Pg xv] the fullest hospitality of these Islands has been extended to our Teuton brethren; while they were invited to successfully compete on their merits with one English industry after another.

[Pg xv]

That they would not rest content with these advantages, this political and commercial equality, that they would want to organize secret treachery, to spy out our weaknesses and hide bombs in their bedrooms, that—to the simple Briton of a few weeks ago—would have seemed impossible.

He now knows what primitive passions may lurk behind a plausible commercialism secretly disappointed in its immoderate greed.

It is in the alliance of despotic militarism with bureaucratic intellectual sophistry that has lain a new peril for the world, and one yet to be fully realized by the German people, when many of the hasty and speculative structures of her self-conscious and academic Protectionism are discovered to be as unsound as the quasi-religious aphorisms of the Kaiser.

In spite of these confident assurances it may be the fate of that arrogant leader to find himself at war with “things,” stony facts, economic laws that crush the transgressor, as well as with an indignant world.

Meanwhile—our armies have fought bravely and held their own in the greatest battle, the most ferocious conflict the world ever dreamed of.

Our unconquered fleet, after the tradition of four centuries, is still “looking for the enemy.”[Pg xvi] All around us, as we write, is evidence that this nation is 

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