21 It is perhaps of interest to note in passing that war-time opinion and prejudice are characteristically pro-national and anti-national, rather than anti-hostile and pro-hostile respectively. The impulse that might have led an isolated German to defend the English at the expense of his countrymen, or an isolated Englishman to defend the Germans at the expense of his countrymen, was in its psychological essence anti-national and animated by no love of the enemy; it was an instinctive revolt against his country, or rather the groups which in the process of social segregation had come to represent it. Such terms, therefore, as pro-German, and in another association pro-Boer, though doubtless convenient implements of abuse, were inexactly descriptive psychologically. “Anti-English” would have been more just, but immensely less effective, as vituperation, for the prejudice it was desired to decry was for the most part a hostility not to the nation, but to its official embodiment. Probably, however, it was the very element of injustice in the term pro-German that made it so satisfactory a vehicle for exasperated feeling.
22 There can be little doubt that national consciousness with regard to the war was very much less developed in this country than in Germany. The theory of his country’s purpose in the war was far less a matter of interest and speculation to the average Englishman than it was to the average German. The German was far more fully aware of the relation the situation bore to general politics and to history, and was much more preoccupied with the defence of his country’s case by rational methods and accepted principles, and he displayed from the first great faith in the value of a propaganda which should appeal to reason. Clumsy and futile as so much of this intellectual effort was ultimately seen to be, it did show that the interest in national affairs was more conscious and elaborate, and stood from the intellectual point of view at a higher level than it did in England.