If England were given over to nationalism as Germany is given over,
then a war between these two Powers, though it would still be a great
dramatic spectacle, would have as little meaning as a duel between two
rival gamebirds in a cockpit. We know, and it will some day dawn on the
Germans, that this War has a deeper meaning than that. We are not
nationalist; we are too deeply experienced in politics to stumble into
that trap. We have had a better and longer political education than has
come to Germany in her short and feverish national life. It is often
said that the Germans are better educated than we are, and in a sense
that is true; they are better furnished with schools and colleges and
the public means of education. The best boy in a school is the boy who
best minds his book, and even if he dutifully believes all that it tells
him, that will not lose him the prize. When he leaves school and
graduates in a wider world, where men must depend on their own judgement
and their own energy, he is often a little disconcerted to find that
some of his less bookish fellows easily outgo him in quickness of
understanding and resource. German education is too elaborate; it
attempts to do for its pupils much that they had better be left to do
for themselves. The pupils are docile and obedient, not troubled with
unruly doubts and questionings, so that the German system of public
education is a system of public mesmerism, and, now that we see it in
its effects, may be truly described as a national disease.

I have said that England is not nationalist. If the English believed in
England as the Germans believe in Germany, there would be nothing for
it but a duel to the death, the extinction of one people or the other,
and darkness as the burier of the dead. Peace would be attained by a
great simplification and impoverishment of the world. But the English do
not believe in themselves in that mad-bull fashion. They come of mixed