that let loose the hateful war. All these causes, adventitious or
fortuitous as they were, only settled the hour of the decision; but
the decision itself was taken and written, probably ages ago, in other
spheres which cannot be reached by the conscious will of man, spheres
in which dark and mighty laws hold sway over illimitable time and
space. The whole line, the whole huge curve of history showed to the
mind of whosoever tried to read its sacred and fearful hieroglyphics
that the day of a new, a formidable and inexorable event was at hand.

The theories built up on this point in the last sixty years by the
German professors, notably by Giesbrecht, the historian of the Ottos
and the Hohenstaufens, and Treitschke, the historian of the
Hohenzollerns, do not necessarily carry conviction but are at least
impressive; and the work of these two writers, which we do not know
as well as we should, and of Treitschke in particular possessed in
Germany an influence that sank deep into every mind, far exceeding
that of Nietzsche, which we looked upon as preponderant.

But let us ignore for the moment all that belongs to a remote past,
the study of which would call for more space than we have at our
disposal. Let us not question the empire of the Ottos, the
Hohenstaufens or the Hapsburgs, in which Germany, at least as a nation
and a race, played but a secondary part and was still unconscious of
her existence. Let us rather see what is happening nearer to us and,
so to speak, before our very eyes.


2

A hundred years ago, under Napoleon, France enjoyed her spell of