Nature has provided but few roads for gregarious species to follow. Between the path England finds herself in and that which Germany has chosen there is a divergence which almost amounts to a specific difference in the biological scale. In this, perhaps, lies the cause of the desperate and unparalleled ferocity of this war. It is a war not so much of contending nations as of contending species. We are not taking part in a mere war, but in one of Nature’s august experiments. It is as if she had {175} set herself to try out in her workshop the strength of the socialized and the aggressive types. To the socialized peoples she has entrusted the task of proving that her old faith in cruelty and blood is at last an anachronism. To try them, she has given substance to the creation of a nightmare, and they must destroy this werewolf or die.2
In attempting to estimate the actual phenomena of the German mind at the present time, we must remember that our sources of knowledge are subject to a rigid selection. Those of us who are unable to give time to the regular reading of German publications must depend on extracts which owe their appearance in our papers to some striking characteristic which may be supposed to be pleasing to the prejudices or hopes of the English reader. The main facts, however, are clear enough to yield {176} valuable conclusions, if such are made on broad lines without undue insistence on minor points.
An intense but often ingenuous and even childish national arrogance is a character that strikes one at once. It seems to be a serious and often a solemn emotion impregnably armoured against the comic sense, and expressed with a childlike confidence in its justness. It is usually associated with a language of metaphor, which is almost always florid and banal, and usually grandiose and strident. This fondness for metaphor and inability to refer to common things by plain names affects all classes, from Emperor to journalist, and gives an impression of peculiar childishness. It reminds one of the primitive belief in the transcendental