ambitions, wandering through the world in the pure, disinterested service
of God and man. On the other hand, because England is a great commercial
Power, they suppose that no Englishman lives for anything but profit.
Because they themselves have conscription, and have to fight or be shot,
they infer that every German is a noble warrior. Because the English
volunteer, they assume that they only volunteer for their pay. Germany,
to them, is a hero clad in white armour, magnanimous, long-suffering, and
invincible. Other nations are little seedy figures in black coats, inspired
exclusively by hatred and jealousy of the noble German, incapable of a
generous emotion or an honourable act, and destined, by the judgment of
history, to be saved, if they can be saved at all, by the great soul and
dominating intellect of the Teuton.

It is in this intoxicating atmosphere of temperament and mood that
the ideas and ambitions of German imperialists work and move. They are
essentially the same as those of imperialists in other countries. Their
philosophy of history assumes an endless series of wars, due to the
inevitable expansion of rival States. Their ethics means a belief in force
and a disbelief in everything else. Their science is a crude misapplication
of Darwinism, combined with invincible ignorance of the true bearings of
science upon life, and especially of those facts and deductions about
biological heredity which, once they are understood, will make it plain
that war degrades the stock of all nations, victorious and vanquished
alike, and that the decline of civilizations is far more plausibly to be
attributed to this cause than to the moral decadence of which history
is always ready, after the event, to accuse the defeated Power. One
peculiarity, perhaps, there is in the outlook of German imperialism,
and that is its emphasis on an unintelligible and unreal abstraction of
"race." Germans, it is thought, are by biological quality the salt of
the earth. Every really great man in Europe, since the break-up of the