true strength of the enemy, and to allow no national prejudice, no liking for pleasant prophesying to distort the truth, and secondly, to guard against exasperating the enemy, lest the inevitable conflict should ultimately be precipitated by her at her moment.
Both these principles the instinctive impulsions to which Germany was liable compelled her to violate. She allowed herself to accept opinions of England’s strength, moral and physical, which were pleasant rather than true. She listened eagerly to political philosophers and historians—the most celebrated of whom was, by an ominous coincidence, deaf—who told her that the Empire of England was founded in fraud and perpetuated in feebleness, that it consisted of a mere loose congeries of disloyal peoples who would fly asunder at the first touch of “reality,” that it was rotten with insurgency, senile decay and satiety, and would not and could not fight. Even if these things had been a full statement of the case, they must have been dangerous doctrines. They were defective because the {182} observers were unaware that they were studying different instinctive