their predatory propensities and their habits of devastation and to
hold them back from their relapse into the _Schrecklichkeit_
of savage warfare? George Meredith says a good thing in 'Diana
of the Crossways': 'Before you can civilize a man, you must first
de-barbarize him.' That is the trouble with the Germans, especially
their leaders and masters. They have never gotten rid of their
fundamental barbarism, the idolatry of might above right.


They have only put on a varnish of civilization.
It cracks and peels off in the heat.


"Take one more illustration. Suppose these German thought-masters
and war-lords had really understood and assimilated the true greatness
of the conception of the old Roman Empire as it is shown, let us
say, by Virgil. You remember that splendid passage in the Sixth
Book of the AEneid where the Romans are called to remember that it
is their mission 'to crown Peace with Law, to spare the humbled,
and to subdue and tame the proud.' Might not sucn a noble doctrine
have detached the Germans a little from their blind devotion to
the Hohenzollern-Hollweg conception of the modern pinchbeck German
Empire--a predatory state, greedy to gain new territory but incapable
of ruling it when gained, scornful of the rights of smaller peoples,
oppressing them when subjugated, as she has oppressed Poland and
Schleswig-Holstein and Alsace-Lorraine, a clumsy and exterminating
tyrant in her own colonies, as she has shown herself in East and
West Africa? I tell you that a vital perception of what the Roman
Empire really meant in its palmy days might have been good medicine
for Germany. It might have taught her to make herself fit for