Niedergang_, was thrust by Germany upon the Allies when she chose that
motto for herself. If the modern man were as much dominated by economic
motives as is sometimes supposed, the suicidal results of such a
conflict would have been apparent to all; but the poetry and idealism of
human nature, no longer centred, as formerly, in religion, had gathered
round a romantic patriotism, for which the belligerents were willing to
sacrifice their all without counting the cost. Like other idealisms,
patriotism varies from a noble devotion to a moral lunacy.

But there was another cause which led to the war. Germany was a curious
combination of seventeenth century theory and very modern practice. An
Emperor ruling by divine right was the head of the most scientific state
that the world has seen. In many ways Germany, with an intelligent,
economical, and uncorrupt Government, was a model to the rest of the
world. But the whole structure was menaced by that form of
individualistic materialism which calls itself social democracy, and
which in practice is at once the copy of organic materialism and the
reaction against it. The motives for drilling a whole nation in the
pursuit of purely national and purely materialistic aims are not strong
enough to prevent disintegration. The German _Kriegsstaat_ was falling
to pieces through internal fissures. A successful war might give the
empire a new lease of life; otherwise, the rising tide of revolution was
certain to sweep it away. As Sir Charles Walston has shown, it was for
some years doubtful whether the democratic movement would obtain control
before the bureaucracy and army chiefs succeeded in precipitating a war.
There was a kind of race between the two forces. This was the situation
which Lord Haldane found still existing in his famous visit to Germany.
In the event, the conservative powers were able to strike and to rush
public opinion. Perhaps the bureaucracy was carried along by its own
momentum. Two or three years before the war a German publicist, replying