herself to a standstill, and then, if her enemies but just succeeded in holding her, her morale would begin to decline, and to decline with terrible abruptness. We were even able to regard it as probable that for all the talk of the war on the German side being defensive only, for all the passionate devotion to the Fatherland and the profound belief in the sanctity of its frontiers, as a matter of cold and dry reality, if it came to invasion, Germany would not be defended by its inhabitants.
Another subject upon which the psychological method of inquiry professed to yield some degree of foresight was that—at that time—fruitful cause of discussion, the objects for which the enemies of Germany were fighting. Opinion at that time was much ruled by the conception of a Germany gradually forced back upon and beyond her frontiers, grim, implacable, irreconcilable, her national spirit energized and made resilient by humiliation, and clinging unconquerably to the thought of a resurrection of her glory through the {226} faith of her sons. Under the influence of ideas of this romantic type, it was not always possible for opinion to be very precise upon what was to be made the object of the war in order to secure from Germany the safety of the civilizations opposed to hers. Psychologically, however, the moral condition of a beaten Germany seemed relatively easy to foretell. If the behaviour of other predaceous types was of any value as a guide, it was plain that a sound beating alone and in itself would produce all the effect that was needful. There could be no fear of the national morale being invigorated by defeat, but an enemy successfully invading Germany would necessarily find the one essential condition on which any subsequent security must be set up—the replacement of the aggressive and predaceous morale by complete moral collapse. These were the considerations that enabled one to say that considered psychologically the mere beating of Germany was the single object of the war. The completeness of the moral collapse which accompanied her beating seems to have been found remarkable and astonishing by very many, but can have been so only to those who had not interested themselves in the psychological aspects of the problem.