alike necessitated that she should take, without the delay which would
have been fatal, the step she did take without delay and unswervingly.
The responsibility for her entry comes back wholly to Germany herself,
who would not have brought it about had she not plunged into war. And
to-day Germany lies prostrate.

But she is not dead. I do not think that for generations to come she
will dream of building again on military foundations. Her people have
had a lesson in the overwhelming forces which are inevitably called into
action where there is brutal indifference to the moral rights of others.
What remains to her is that which she has inherited and preserved of the
results of the great advancement in knowledge which began under the
inspiration of Lessing and Kant, and culminated in the teaching of
Goethe and Schiller and of the thinkers who were their contemporaries.
That movement only came to a partial end in 1832. No doubt its character
changed after that. The idealists in poetry, music, and philosophy gave
place to great men of science, to figures such as those of Ludwig and
Liebig, of Gauss, Riemann, and Helmholtz. There came also historians
like Ranke and Mommsen, musicians like Wagner, philosophers like
Schopenhauer and Lotze, a statesman like Bismarck. To-day there are few
men of great stature in Germany; there are, indeed, few men of genius
anywhere in the world. But Germany still has a high general level in
science, and of recent years she has produced great captains of
industry. The gift for organization founded on principle, and for
applying science to practical uses, was there before the war, and it is
very unsafe to assume that it is not there in a latent form to-day. If
it is, Germany will be heard of again with a field of activity that
probably will not include devotion to military affairs in the old way.
Against her competition of this other kind, formidable as soon as she
has recovered from her misery, we must prepare ourselves in the only way