to some confusion between race and nationality, or to simple national
megalomania, which usually subsides after a healthy humiliation, such as we
suffered in England, for example, in the Boer War or as Russia suffered in
her struggle with the Japanese.

[Footnote 1: The student is advised to read the chapter on Germany before
beginning this section.]

Yet a careful examination of the German body-politic will reveal symptoms
unlike those to be found in any other nation. German nationalism is
over-developed in one direction because it is under-developed and imperfect
in other directions. Apply our three tests to the German nation, and it
will be found to fail in them all. National boundary and State frontier do
not coincide because there are still some twelve million Germans living
outside Germany, in Austria-Hungary;[1] Germany is a State, but not a
unitary State, for she still retains the obsolete "particularism" of the
eighteenth century, with its petty princes and dynastic frontiers; and
lastly, the government of Germany cannot claim to express the general will,
while more than a third of the voters in the empire are sworn to overthrow
the whole system at the earliest opportunity. The German nation, in
fact, is suffering from some form of arrested development, and arrested
development, as the criminologists tell us, is almost invariably
accompanied by morbid psychology. That Germany at the present moment, and
for some time past, has been the victim of a morbid state of mind, few
impartial observers will deny. It has, however, not been so generally
recognised that this disease--for it is nothing less--is due not to any
national depravity but to constitutional and structural defects, which are
themselves the result of an unfortunate series of historical accidents. Let
us look a little closer into this matter, considering the three defects in
German nationalism one by one, and using the story of Italy as an aid to