society it produces an aspect of sentimentality and flabbiness; its tendency slowly to evolve towards the moral equality of its members gives the State an appearance of structural insecurity.
If Germany was to be capable of a consistent aggressive external policy as a primary aim, the peculiarity of her circumstances rendered her unable to seek national inspiration by any development of the socialized type of instinctive response, because that method can produce the necessary moral power only through a true unity of its members, such as implies a moral, if not a material, equality among them. That the type is capable of yielding a passion of aggressive nationalism is shown by the early enterprise and conquests of the first French Republic. But that outburst of power was attained only because it was based on a true, though doubtless imperfect, moral equality. Such a method was necessarily forbidden to the German Empire by the intense rigidity of its social segregation, with its absolute differentiation between the aristocracy and the common people. In such a society there could {170} be