a serious downfall. It would seem hardly probable that the amalgamation
between elements so utterly dissimilar can permanently endure. The
kindly, studious, sociable, rather naïvely innocent German mass-people
dragged by the scruff of the neck into the arena of militarism and
world-politics, may for a time have had their heads turned by the
exalted position in which they found themselves; but it is not likely
that they will continue for long to enjoy the situation. With no great
instinct for politics, nor any marked gift of tact and discernment,
unsuccessful as a rule as colonists,[17] and with no understanding of
how to govern--except on the Prussian lines, which are every day
becoming more obsolete and less adapted to the modern world--the rôle
which their empire-building philosophers set out for them is one which
they are eminently unfitted to fulfil. It is sad, but we cannot blame
them for the defect. They blame the world in general for siding against
them in this affair, but do not see that in most cases it has been their
own want of perception which has left them on the wrong side of the
hedge.

Bismarck, with his "Blood and Iron" policy, made a huge blunder in not
perceiving that in the modern world spiritual forces are arising which
must for ever discredit the same. He emphasized the blunder by wresting
Alsace-Lorraine from France, and again by crippling Russia in the treaty
of 1878--thus making enemies where generosity might have brought him
friends. The German Executive in July of last year (1914) showed
extraordinary want of tact in not seeing that Russia, rebuffed in 1908
over Bosnia and Herzegovina, would never put up with a _second_ insult
of the same kind over Servia. The same Government was strangely unable
to perceive that whatever it might tactically gain by the invasion and
devastation of Belgium would be more than lost by the moral effect of
such action on the whole world; and notwithstanding its army of spies,