as absolute and abstract as before, as contemptuous of temperament and
measure, as blind to those compromises and qualifications, those decencies,
so to speak, of nature, by which reality is constituted. The Germans now
saw men instead of gods, but they saw them as trees walking.

German imperialism, then, while it involves the same intellectual
presuppositions, the same confusions, the same erroneous arguments, the
same short-sighted ambitions, as the imperialism of other countries,
exhibits them all in an extreme degree. All peoples admire themselves. But
the self-adoration of Germans is so naive, so frank, so unqualified, as to
seem sheerly ridiculous to more experienced nations.[1] The English and the
French, too, believe their civilization to be the best in the world. But
English common-sense and French sanity would prevent them from announcing
to other peoples that they proposed to conquer them, morally or materially,
for their good. All Jingoes admire and desire war. But nowhere else in the
modern world is to be found such a debauch of "romantic" enthusiasm, such
a wilful blindness to all the realities of war, as Germany has manifested
both before and since the outbreak of this world-catastrophe. A reader
of German newspapers and tracts gets at last a feeling of nausea at the
very words _Wir Deutsche_, followed by the eternal _Helden, Heldenthum,
Heldenthat_, and is inclined to thank God if he indeed belong to a nation
sane enough to be composed of _Händler_.

The very antithesis between _Helden_ (heroes) and _Händler_ (hucksters),
with which all Germany is ringing, is an illustration of the romantic
quality that vitiates their intelligence. In spite of the fact that they
are one of the greatest trading and manufacturing nations of the world, and
that precisely the fear of losing their trade and markets has been, as they
constantly assert, a chief cause that has driven them to war, they speak
as though Germany were a kind of knight-errant, innocent of all material