of other European countries. Yet if Germans themselves are to be believed, much of that superiority which the English see in Germany is as purely non-existent as the phantom German war-balloon to which the British Press devoted serious columns, to the phantom army corps in Epping Forest, to the phantom stories of arms in London cellars, and to the German spy which English patriots see in every Italian waiter.46
Despite the hypnotism which German "progress" seems to exercise on the minds of English Jingoes, the German people themselves, as distinct from the small group of Prussian Junkers, are not in the least enamored of it, as is proved by the unparalleled growth of the social-democratic element, which is the negation of military imperialism, and which, as the figures in Prussia prove, receives support not from one class of the population merely, but from the mercantile, industrial, and professional classes as well. The agitation for electoral reform in Prussia shows how acute the conflict has become; on the one side the increasing democratic element showing more and more of a revolutionary tendency, and on the other side the Prussian autocracy showing less and less disposition to yield. Does anyone really believe that the situation will remain there, that the Democratic parties will continue to grow in numbers and be content for ever to be ridden down by the "booted Prussian," and that German democracy will indefinitely accept a situation in which it will be always possible—in the words of the Junker, von Oldenburg, member of the Reichstag—for the German Emperor to say to a Lieutenant, "Take ten men and close the Reichstag"?
What must be the German's appreciation of the value of