weakness, reached, as it were, symbolic culmination when the mediæval
monarchy was extinguished, and the English squires gave to what was
little more than a German squire the damaged and diminished crown.

It must be remembered that the Germanics were at that time used as a
sort of breeding-ground for princes. There is a strange process in
history by which things that decay turn into the very opposite of
themselves. Thus in England Puritanism began as the hardest of creeds,
but has ended as the softest; soft-hearted and not unfrequently
soft-headed. Of old the Puritan in war was certainly the Puritan at his
best; it was the Puritan in peace whom no Christian could be expected to
stand. Yet those Englishmen to-day who claim descent from the great
militarists of 1649 express the utmost horror of militarism. An
inversion of an opposite kind has taken place in Germany. Out of the
country that was once valued as providing a perpetual supply of kings
small enough to be stop-gaps, has come the modern menace of the one
great king who would swallow the kingdoms of the earth. But the old
German kingdoms preserved, and were encouraged to preserve, the good
things that go with small interests and strict boundaries, music,
etiquette, a dreamy philosophy, and so on. They were small enough to be
universal. Their outlook could afford to be in some degree broad and
many-sided. They had the impartiality of impotence. All this has been
utterly reversed, and we find ourselves at war with a Germany whose
powers are the widest and whose outlook is the narrowest in the world.

It is true, of course, that the English squires put themselves over the
new German prince rather than under him. They put the crown on him as an
extinguisher. It was part of the plan that the new-comer, though royal,
should be almost rustic. Hanover must be one of England's possessions
and not England one of Hanover's. But the fact that the court became a