Professor Haeckel, another of the witnesses raised up against us, attained
to some celebrity at one time through proving the remarkable resemblance
between two different things by printing duplicate pictures of the same
thing. Professor Haeckel's contribution to biology, in this case, was
exactly like Professor Harnack's contribution to ethnology. Professor
Harnack knows what a German is like. When he wants to imagine what an
Englishman is like, he simply photographs the same German over again. In
both cases there is probably sincerity as well as simplicity. Haeckel was
so certain that the species illustrated in embryo really are closely
related and linked up, that it seemed to him a small thing to simplify it
by mere repetition. Harnack is so certain that the German and Englishman
are almost alike, that he really risks the generalisation that they are
exactly alike. He photographs, so to speak, the same fair and foolish face
twice over; and calls it a remarkable resemblance between cousins. Thus he
can prove the existence of Teutonism just about as conclusively as Haeckel
has proved the more tenable proposition of the non-existence of God. Now
the German and the Englishman are not in the least alike--except in the
sense that neither of them are negroes. They are, in everything good and
evil, more unlike than any other two men we can take at random from the
great European family. They are opposite from the roots of their history,
nay, of their geography. It is an understatement to call Britain insular.
Britain is not only an island, but an island slashed by the sea till it
nearly splits into three islands; and even the Midlands can almost smell
the salt. Germany is a powerful, beautiful and fertile inland country,
which can only find the sea by one or two twisted and narrow paths, as
people find a subterranean lake. Thus the British Navy is really national
because it is natural; it has co-hered out of hundreds of accidental
adventures of ships and shipmen before Chaucer's time and after it. But the
German Navy is an artificial thing; as artificial as a constructed Alp
would be in England. William II has simply copied the British Navy as