Chapter V: Enemies

The people is a beast of muddy brain

That knows not its own strength, and therefore stands

Loaded with wood and stone; the powerless hands

Of a mere child guide it with bit and rein;

One kick would be enough to break the chain.

But the beast fears, and what the child demands

It does; nor its own terror understands,

Confused and stupified by bugbears vain.

Most wonderful! With its own hand it ties

And gags itself—gives itself death and war

For pence doled out by kings from its own store.

Its own are all things between earth and heaven;

But this it knows not; and if one arise

To tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven.

—Campanella, translated by John Addington Symonds.

“I tell you: one must have chaos within to enable one to give birth to a dancing star.” In the middle of the last century there was chaos within Germany, enough to give birth to Nietzsche. Schopenhauer the pessimist, Bismarck the imperialist, Strauss the rationalist, Moltke the militarist, Lassalle the philosophical socialist, and Treitschke the absolutist—all, in their various directions, labouring in a Christian country—the strife of the new against the old, the battle between evil and good—created the intellectual chaos from which the gentle, fastidious, retiring advocate of the superman burst out like a dancing star. The Christian state which in its business from one year’s end to another denied and even derided every one of the beatitudes of Jesus, was the field that awaited Nietzsche’s work. Intellectual riot was fast overcoming Hegelianism and Lutheranism; the period which must come under fundamentally false conditions when the hypocrisy and cant of society are fiercely attacked by those who are bold enough to point out where life is not lived as life is preached, had about reached its meridian. Strong men had surveyed the field before Nietzsche; Marx had done something to prepare the ground; and earlier still, Max Stirner had put in the blade of his uprooting plough; Michael Bakunin also had left traces in Germany after the disturbances of 1849. His pronouncement, “we object to all legislation, all authority, all influence, privilege, patented, official and legal, even when it has proceeded from universal suffrage; convinced that it must always turn to the profit of a dominating and exploiting minority, against the interests of the immense majority of the enslaved,” found an echo in that sublime phrase of Nietzsche, “where the State ceaseth there beginneth that man who is not superfluous.”

Christianity had been on its trial,—the new “evil.” Men were dissatisfied with the verdict “not proven,” and spent their days in discovering fresh evidence against it. From the conflict of diverse views in economics, religion, and politics, Nietzsche arose with his lonely David, not of Israel, but of Sahara.

It was time for a new philosophy. Whether the philosophy of the superman will be of as much value to mankind as the disciples of Nietzsche believe, is not of great consequence; because a world of intellectual supermen would be the one that Nietzsche of all men would not live in, even if the “much-too-many” had passed from the conditions which necessitated the invention of the State. An intellectual change would not alter the position of the superfluous man, nor make men practise what they preach. Yet it may be probable that no one saw so clearly the terrific force of Dostoevsky’s Myshkin as Nietzsche. Some one may some day take up the tangled skein of his thought and connect its strands with those of the men who influenced his work.

His description of Europe in the years between 1860 to 1880 will stand; from music to women, from philosophy to oratory, from alcohol to politics, it will satisfy the most persistent investigator. Critic, iconoclast, and illuminator of society and systems, he stands pre-eminent. He soars high in many respects above our own Carlyle whom he disliked so much. He thought he saw in Carlyle the lack of those fundamentals he despised. But intellectual and physical supermen without equal rights—not equality—will be dispensable giants under proper economic conditions; namely, when the superfluous man comes into his own.

Gerhart Hauptmann, so it is reported, said that the German soldier goes to the front with a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra in his knapsack. That is a pretty tall statement, but it is conceivable that many of the town-bred soldiers of Germany know something of Nietzsche. The real influence of Nietzsche has not, however, shown itself in any of the actions of the German people up to the present. They in no way appreciate his meaning of war—less indeed than English journalists.“I see many soldiers: would I could see many warriors! ‘ Uniform ’ they call what they wear: would it were not uniform what they hide under it!” Prussians have not the sense of humour to grasp all there is in his Joyful Wisdom. This is written with all respect for the great body of literary Britain who during the war have been industriously picking the mote out of German eyes. There is nothing even savouring of the individualism of Nietzsche in German life. Even Richard Strauss in his tone-poem caricatures the superman; though he has made an attempt recently to approach Dionysus. The largest political body in Germany is socialistic—anathema to Nietzsche, the Government is bureaucratic!—invented for the much-too-many, and individualism cannot exist in an army or navy; as for the church,—well, as there has never been room in it for Jesus, it is not likely that any lowlier individualist may attempt to declare from its pulpits that “the Kingdom of God is within you.”

There are so many diverse notions of Individualism that it may be opportune to ask, What is the individualism of Nietzsche? True individualism it is not, for it is without economic foundation. His will-to-life-power does not go deep enough; it lacks a subsistence-basis—hence, perhaps, his notion of slaves. It is exceedingly difficult to place a fundamental value on the individualism of Nietzsche for he so often confuses man and nature, and the functions of both. Delve into his philosophy as deeply as you will, on this matter astounding contradictions abound; he is so full of multitudes, as Whitman would say. Then in the search for fundamentals, Dionysus appears so often perhaps to mock our exertions. Take the passage:

“‘Exploitation ’ does not belong to a depraved, or imperfect, or primitive society: it belongs to the Nature of the living being as a primary organic function; it is a consequence of the intrinsic Will to Power which is precisely the will to life. Granting that as a theory this is a novelty—as a reality it is a fundamental fact of all history: let us be so far honest to ourselves!”

Nietzsche here assumes he is propounding something new, something he has discovered as a fundamental fact, but the word “exploitation” has old and new meanings. If the sentence is to be applied to man’s right to exploit equally with other men all natural resources, then the statement is compatible with true Individualism. But, if, on the other hand, the statement and the use of the word “exploitation,” are to be applied to some men’s power to exploit the labour of other men, then it refers to our old enemy Monopoly, and is no new theory or fundamental fact. The context from which the statement is torn refers to individuals; but “exploitation” belonging “to the Nature of the living being as a primary organic function,” is a phrase which carries the understanding back to man’s struggle with Nature for subsistence, and the fundamental basis of equal rights to exploit the earth for the satisfaction of his desires and needs. Who can tell us just where Nietzsche stood on this question? Georg Brandes? Perhaps! Certainly he saw clearly the basic fault in the contentions of Marx and Lassalle.

Yet, it would not be strange if this hater of everything German was, at this time, shaping in the minds of German soldiers tendencies against established forms in the Fatherland, more dangerous than all the armaments of the Allies and their millions of men battling east and west. If they have got hold of the true Nietzsche, the Nietzsche who saw that “Europe wishes to be one”—then it is probable that Germans may now be in the throes of a vast intellectual upheaval.

Though he strikes without mercy at the God made by man, the vain, malicious, vindictive God of a Christianity which is all that Jesus was not, Nietzsche never assails the religious man: “rare one, solitary soul!” he would say of him. God is associated with Christianity—“invented by Jews,”—churches, rituals, etc. Passages in Sanctus Januarius reek with scorn of a man-made God. The gulf that lies between Jesus and Nietzsche is not wide; his appreciation of Dostoevsky is the fingerpost which points that way; but the gulf that yawns between Nietzsche and Christianity, as he sees it, cannot be spanned.

Whether Germans know the elusive, inspiring, nimble, attractive Nietzsche or no, a people who have a literature so rich in wondrous contradictions are a people whom the world must reckon with, for they are capable of great revolutions, unless an oriental sickness fall upon their intelligence. Through Nietzsche back to Novalis,—for these two sickly ones touched at many points. Both in different generations explored many of the bye-ways of intellectual life. Like Walt Whitman, Nietzsche perhaps saw tokens at the wayside.

“I wonder where I get those tokens,

Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?”

Back to Novalis! Well, we shall see. Anyway, no thinker who brings the future into his hour of meditation need be afraid of Nietzsche. Truth was evil long before he wrote. A list of “evil” men would take us back to Newton, to Galileo, to Jesus. Truth is always “evil” when it falls upon established forms.

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How has it been with us? The antipathy to Germany, since the Kruger telegram and Mr. Chamberlain’s speech, delivered in the early days of the Boer War, increased in venom and bitterness. From 1905 there has been a campaign unremitting in its hatred, though at intervals checked by the very intensity of its spleen,—as a fit of coughing brought on by vociferous anger stops for a while the reviling of a virago,—that has on several occasions brought the two countries to the verge of hostilities. The crusade for a protective tariff, which began in 1902, taught the people a form of militant Christianity in commercial affairs which roused every brutish instinct and subjugated all the virtues of brotherhood. The catchwords of the propaganda were Bismarckian. Retaliation was one of the words to conjure with; and “Don’t take it lying down!” was the phrase to stir lethargic audiences to demonstrations of vindictive joy. “Hit the foreigner back,” and “Make the foreigner pay the tax,” were expressions which rung for three years from end to end of this Christian land. And everything made in Germany was, to a large section of the British people, worse than garments worn by lepers. All the platform changes were rung on the seven deadly sins, making virtues of them for the needs of Mr. Chamberlain’s campaign. Cobden’s platitudes were laughed to scorn: “Peace and good-will among nations” was the cry of Britain’s worst enemies. Hundreds of thousands of working men and women were daily told that the hated foreigner took the bread out of the mouths of the children of British artisans. Ministers of the gospel frequently presided over protectionist meetings while orators discoursed the most blatant rubbish a sensible, God-loving nation ever listened to.

No Nietzschean gospel ever went so far in that respect. Bands of landlords and manufacturers connived at getting for their land and their wares from the millions, whose purchasing power was extremely low, more than they were worth in a free and open market. All the greed, envy, and enmity of commercialism were let loose in that campaign by the maker of the South African War, to cover up the misdeeds of the Government of which he was Colonial Secretary. Lord Hugh Cecil, in referring to the campaign, said, “Its methods were repulsive. They were the methods of dragooning.” Britain might not have had her Treitschke, but she had her Chamberlain. The time was surely ripe for the advent of a British Nietzsche. Steadily the churches had been getting emptier and emptier; the divines screamed to the people to come and worship God, but the people knew in a dumb, vague way they would not hear much about the All-Father even if they took the trouble to go. So they flocked to Brotherhood meetings of a strictly undenominational character; and those who liked not religious services of any kind thronged to the platform of the atheist or the rationalist in the parks; thousands of others preferring the public-house to the squalor of the homes they are now shedding their blood to defend.

With the aristocratic class, what is popularly thought to be superman-philosophy was thought if it were not spoken. At the end of 1905, it would have been difficult for Diogenes to find a country under the sun where there was so deep a contempt for the poor and the meek held by the ruling class. Many British villages were not unlike slave compounds, and few were the men, who did not think politically as the squires thought, who dared to call their souls their own. Labourers in agriculture at any wage from twelve to sixteen shillings a week; miners living in hovels; railway porters at less than a pound a week; and cotton operatives packed into dull, drab streets of mean houses—these were some of the millions that were to breed a race of men whose destiny it would be to write on foreign battlefields new pages on the might of Christian Britain to uphold justice and national righteousness. That was the condition of Britain after the close of the Boer War.

During the Boer War it was the people who mafficked; since the beginning of this war sections of the press have mafficked; the people have been strangely circumspect. But a survey of the newspapers since the close of the Boer War reveals an almost uninterrupted exhibition of repellent Jingoism in the columns of most of the London penny papers. In tracing the history of our press campaign against Germany one has to go back to the time when the German Emperor cast anchor at Tangier; when the British public, and perhaps the press, were ignorant of the secret articles to the Anglo-French Agreement. In that year there was a reduction of £3,500,000 in our navy estimates. This might have had something to do with the tremendous outburst in the press against the Emperor’s visit to Morocco. Nevertheless, Jingo journalistic fury was of such a violent character that Lord Rosebery viewed the attack with grave apprehension. Even Mr. Broderick, who had been Secretary for War in a Conservative Administration, was moved to remark:

“There could be no personal feelings between the Government of this country and Germany. He would go further and say, there was no outstanding question of any description between the two governments, and that there was nothing that should raise animosity between them, and that there was nothing which stood between them and friendship. All the suggestions of misunderstandings might be put aside with those stories which had commended themselves to some minds, of plans for an irruption of 100,000 soldiers into Schleswig-Holstein, or of unexpected and entirely gratuitous attacks, which might serve to lubricate the pens of some pressmen, but which would get short shrift from any responsible statesmen.”

There was, however, more truth than journalism in the report about an invasion of Schleswig-Holstein. Responsible political leaders in France understood that M. Delcassé told his friends that if Germany and France quarrelled, England was willing to mobilize her fleet, throw a force of 100,000 men into Schleswig-Holstein, and seize the Kiel Canal. Neither remonstrance from von Bülow in Berlin nor censure from our leaders stemmed the flow of ink. The French Agreement was made the bone of contention in the foreign press; in Austrian, Italian, and German journals it was taken as a menace to the Triple Alliance, and in the yellow press of those countries a bitter agitation against Britain was carried on. The jaundiced school of writers in this country sent their shameful screeds all over the land in superlative efforts to outdo the acrimonious stuff published abroad. Soon the nation, or that part of it which revels in horrors, devoured the literature of carnage, and went to bed with a twelve-inch nightmare and woke to greet the columns of vindictive ravings from the pens of hirelings of the armament-ring. How much of all the campaign was inspired by the British and French departments for Foreign Affairs will never be known; no, not any more than the millions of roubles spent by Russia in corrupting a section of the foreign press. Still we do know something of the part played in the degrading affair by M. Delcassé. His own countryman, M. de Pressensé, once Foreign Editor of Le Temps, wrote:

“We know by what a series of faults an excellent situation was compromised. M. Delcassé, inebriated by the entente with England, of which he had been but an eleventh-hour artisan, hypnotized by the favour of the Czar, thought the hour had struck for heroic enterprises. He dreamed, if he did not conscientiously project, a sort of revanche by the humiliation of Germany.”

In Le Gaulois, July 12th, 1905, M. Delcassé, a short time after his downfall, said:

“Of what importance would the young navy of Germany be in the event of war in which England, I tell you, would assuredly be with us against Germany? What would become of Germany’s ports or her trade, or her mercantile marine? They would be annihilated. That is what would be the significance of the visit, prepared and calculated, of the British squadron to Brest, while the return visit of the French squadron to Portsmouth will complete the demonstration. The entente between the two countries and the coalition of their navies, constitutes such a formidable machine of naval war that neither Germany, nor any other Power, would dare to face such an overwhelming force at sea.”

And this was the man who was Minister for Foreign Affairs in France when the Anglo-French Agreement with its secret articles was signed. Yet there are journalists in Britain who lead their readers to believe that they are informed as to foreign affairs, who charge Germany with having provoked the rise in naval expenditure! The evidence is all the other way about.

Every man who raised his voice in protest against the articles of the Blue-Funk school was assailed as a traitor or a coward. The men of the bulldog breed wrote from behind the screens of editorial rooms their prodigious fulminations on “Little Englanders” and Pro-Boers. From the dust-bins of the Admiralty and the War Office they gathered flotsam and jetsam, the gossip of disappointed half-pay officers and clerks, often enough the rejected information of servitors not required again.

Mr. Bryce, in October, 1905, pointed to the danger of the press campaign:

“Press reports, press attacks, tend to inflame and irritate men’s minds. When you are told day after day that some one is hating you and watching his chance to attack you, you may begin to hate him, and put the worst construction on innocent acts. Harm has already been done which may take some time to remove.”

Mr. Morley dealt with the same problem in his speech at Arbroath, about the same time Mr. Bryce spoke. Mr. Morley said:

“(Foreign Affairs) are the most obscure, the most delicate, the most complex, the gravest province of public business, and yet, oddly enough, this grave, obscure, delicate province is a free field, where people find it most easy to be, if you pardon the word, cocksure, where they think it is most appropriate to fly into a passion, and to use the worst language either about foreign nations or about those of their fellow-countrymen who do not happen to agree with them.”

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Sir Edward Grey also laid stress in their speeches on the necessity of responsible politicians doing something to heal the breach made by Jingo journalists between Great Britain and Germany.

Three months after the General Election the yellow press got down to work in real earnest. One paper told its readers that “there never was a Radical Government that was able to make itself respected abroad, and under the new régime at Westminster, British support of France will be worth precious little. And with the defeat of France, British prestige must inevitably suffer; but this is no more than might be expected.” The press attack was marvellously effective. Under Mr. Haldane the Expeditionary Force was reorganized, on a mobilization basis, for service abroad, to comprise 150,000 men. In criticising the Haldane scheme, Lord Roberts, in the House of Lords, fanned the flames of Jingo feeling in the country, and incidentally gave the yellow press scribes some material for future articles:

“If we were required to deal with ‘ a Continental situation ’ a striking force of much greater strength than 150,000 men would, in my humble opinion, be needed, if not at the very outset, long before any large number of reinforcements could be trained. We would under these circumstances be fighting against a most carefully organized army between two and three millions strong, and thoroughly fitted in all respects for war, the commanders of which would be fully cognizant of our unpreparedness and would give us as little breathing time as possible. I doubt whether it is realized in this country that the Continental armies, behind their vast mobilized strength, possess practically unlimited reserves. In Germany, for instance, though it is usually supposed that only about five million men would be subject to the extreme demand of the State, there are altogether actually no less than ten million men over fighting age who have passed through the ranks at one period or another.”

Alarmists generally fastened on to this statement and pushed it for all it was worth. Lord Halsbury went so far as to say:

“As for Mr. Haldane, his profession of economy, combined with neglect of the military opinion of Earl Roberts and other experts, afforded a serious temptation to hostile countries to seek the first opportunity to humiliate and attack us.”

In the autumn of 1906 a section of the Tory press did its best to whip up a navy scare because the Government reduced the estimates. “Patriotism is thrown to the winds,” screamed the Daily Mail. The scares promoted by the yellow press, and the bitter attacks on our Teutonic neighbour affected the disposition of Germany towards the Hague convention. Mr. Balfour did not hesitate to say that Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s attitude was hypocritical, inasmuch as he took credit for strengthening the army and the navy while he attended the Hague peace meetings for disarmament. The Prime Minister told his audience at Manchester that “he knew that we have been suspected of a wish, a sinister wish, to embarrass Germany by raising the question.” In explaining the situation he said:

“We thought it our duty to seize the opportunity which the Hague Conference offered for seeing whether a step might not be taken in the right direction for reducing armaments. I think we were right. . . . The German Government appears to believe that such a method is idle and illusory and, as they hold they can have no share in it, I recognize and respect the candour with which Prince Bülow has decided to stand aside from the discussion altogether.”

The scaremongers kept up the attack. It was suggested that “the Government had wrecked the army and were now trying to wreck the navy.” The statements of the panicmongers however reached such a limit that a Tory paper, in an article from a well-informed correspondent on naval affairs, said:

“The nation is in no danger whatever from the navies of Continental Powers. . . . Notwithstanding the volume and energy of attacks on the Admiralty, it is significant that neither in the House of Commons nor in the House of Lords has a single division been taken on any one of the questions at issue. This proves that either the Unionist Opposition is indifferent to or ignorant of the country’s impending fate, or that the campaign against the Admiralty is the work of windbags whose puncture and perforation by facts will be followed by deflation.”

The position of our navy with those of Germany, France, and Russia was as follows:

Great Britain	Germany, France, and Russia.
1,132,205 tons.	1,108,280 tons.

Britain exceeded the tonnage of the next three Powers by 23,925 tons.

Let us review the march of events. The Lansdowne-Delcassé public and secret agreements about Morocco were signed in April, 1904. Neither Britain nor France notified Germany of the public agreement. The secret agreement meant that France, Spain, and Britain had contracted to violate the integrity and independence of Morocco. In March, 1905, the German Emperor visited Tangier with the object of safeguarding “efficaciously the interests of Germany in Morocco,” to use his own words in his address to the Sultan’s representatives. Then followed the war in the British and Continental press. But the secret articles were not made known until six years after the visit that caused the sensation in Britain and France. In January, 1906, Sir Edward Grey agreed with the French Government that conversations should take place between British and French military and naval experts. In the autumn of 1905, M. Delcassé was forced to resign his portfolio, and Le Matin published the story of Britain’s willingness to send a force in support of France into Schleswig-Holstein. In April, 1906, the Belgian and British military authorities in Brussels entered into arrangements for the co-operation of a British Expeditionary Force of 150,000, with the Belgian army against Germany. Mr. Haldane announced in the following month of July that the force had been reorganized on a mobilization basis of 150,000. The Act of Algeciras was signed April 7th, 1906, sandwiched between the consent given by Sir Edward Grey to the British and French military and naval conversations, and the Brussels arrangement for Belgian and British military co-operation in the event of a war with Germany. These are the facts which cannot be denied by honest men. It may of course be necessary, playing the game of the chancelleries, for diplomatists and governments to deny some of these facts; but it takes only the very smallest experience to know what the denials of Ministers are worth.

The murder of the Austrian archduke, whether he was murdered by Russia, or Serbia, or Vienna, had little or nothing to do with this present war. It might have been a pretext for bringing things to a head, but to say it was the initial cause of the war is the most unprincipled falsehood a Jingo journal ever indulged in. This war had long beginnings; they lay in the “pathos of distance” as Nietzsche would say. Not the violation of the integrity and independence of Belgium, but the violation of the integrity and independence of Morocco. Not the antique treaty of 1839, but the secret articles which accompanied the Agreement of 1904,—which were not made known to the world until November, 1911, wherein Spain, France, and Britain had contracted for the partition of Morocco.

The scaremongers in the summer of 1908 held high carnival; the Daily Telegraph spread the legend that the Government intended to float a loan of £100,000,000, so that we might be able to build a navy large enough to deal with Germany. Early in the New Year there was a great deal of electricity in the diplomatic air. Austria publicly accused Britain of a policy of deliberate malevolence. Sir Edward Grey repudiated the allegations and said they were sheer inventions. But neither the Foreign Secretary’s protest nor the assurances of other Ministers as to the pacific intentions of the Government, seemed to allay the anxiety of Continental Powers or the perturbations of the alarmists at home.

On August 14th, 1908, Mr. Churchill, at Swansea, delivered a remarkable speech on our relations with Germany. This speech should be preserved, for there is a passage in it that makes strange reading now, when nearly the whole of the British press, day after day, tells us that the German people are a brutish race, trained by Sybel, Treitschke, and Bernhardi. When the war is over, diplomatic relations will be resumed; trade will spring up again between the two peoples; and a memory of what some men in the days before the actual strife have said of Germany and the German people, may be useful in establishing once more those relations which true Christian people may aspire to but never quite enjoy. The speech to be quoted from, and no apology is thought necessary for the length of the extract, was delivered only a few weeks after Lord Cromer, in the House of Lords, spoke of a European conflict which might be forced upon us before many years. Mr. Churchill said:

“I think it is greatly to be deprecated that persons should try to spread the belief in this country that war between Great Britain and Germany is inevitable. It is all nonsense. In the first place, the alarmists have no grounds whatever for their panic or fear. . . . Look at it from any point of view you like, and I say you will come to the conclusion in regard to the relations between England and Germany that there is no real cause of difference between them, and although there may be snapping and snarling in the newspapers, and in the London clubs, those two great people have nothing to fight about, have no prize to fight for, and have no place to fight in. . . .

“What does all this snapping and snarling amount to after all? How many people do you suppose there are in Germany who really want to make a murderous attack on this country? I do not suppose in the whole of that great population of fifty or sixty millions of inhabitants there are ten thousand persons who would seriously contemplate such a hellish and wicked crime; and how many do you think there are in this country? I do not believe there are even that number to be found in our country. . . . But even if the fifteen thousand persons whom we will say in Germany and this country desire to make war on one another were as influential as one would think from the noise they make and the clatter they keep up, what about the rest of us? What about the one hundred millions of people who dwell in these islands and Germany? Are we all such sheep? Is democracy in the twentieth century so powerless to affect its will? Are we all become such puppets and marionettes to be wire-pulled against our interests into such hideous convulsions? I have a high and prevailing faith in the essential goodness of great people. . . . I have come here this afternoon to ask you to join with me in saying that far and wide throughout the masses of the British dominions there is no feeling of ill-will towards Germany. I say we honour that strong, patient, industrious German people, who have been for so many centuries divided, a prey to European intrigue and a drudge amongst the nations of the Continent. Now in the fulness of time, after many tribulations they have by their virtues and valour won themselves a foremost place in the front of civilization. I say we do not envy them their good fortune; we do not envy them their power and prosperity. We are not jealous of them; we wish them well from the bottom of our hearts, and we believe most firmly the victories they will win in science and learning against barbarism, against waste, the victories they will gain will be victories in which we shall share, and which, while benefiting them, will also benefit us.”

It is sad to think of sentiments such as those expressed by Mr. Churchill six years ago, and then of what is taking place now. Looking from the reign of terror which now exists in Belgium, back to the days when English statesmen believed the German people, “by their virtues and valour had won for themselves a foremost place in the front of civilization,” it is difficult to associate with the Germany of Wagner and Richard Strauss and Lenbach, of Goethe and Schiller, and of Schopenhauer and von Humboldt, all the vandalism of Louvain, Dinant, and Malines.