England and the War | Page 6

refused to wait her turn. She
crowded up on to the scaffold, which even now is in peril of breaking
down under the weight of its victims, and of burying the executioner in

its ruins. But because England would not wait her turn, she is
overwhelmed with accusations of treachery and inhumanity by a
sincerely indignant Germany. Could stupidity, the stupidity of the wise
men of Gotham, be more fantastic or more monstrous?
German stupidity was even more monstrous. A part of the accusation
against England is that she has raised her hand against the nation
nearest to her in blood. The alleged close kinship of England and
Germany is based on bad history and doubtful theory. The English are
a mixed race, with enormous infusions of Celtic and Roman blood. The
Roman sculpture gallery at Naples is full of English faces. If the
German agents would turn their attention to hatters' shops, and give the
barbers a rest, they would find that no English hat fits any German head.
But suppose we were cousins, or brothers even, what kind of argument
is that on the lips of those who but a short time before were explaining,
with a good deal of zest and with absolute frankness, how they
intended to compass our ruin? There is something almost amiable in
fatuity like this. A touch of the fool softens the brute.
The Germans have a magnificent war-machine which rolls on its way,
crushing all that it touches. We shall break it if we can. If we fail, the
German nation is at the beginning, not the end, of its troubles. With the
making of peace, even an armed peace, the war-machine has served its
turn; some other instrument of government must then be invented.
There is no trace of a design for this new instrument in any of the
German shops. The governors of Alsace-Lorraine offer no suggestions.
The bald fact is that there is no spot in the world where the Germans
govern another race and are not hated. They know this, and are
disquieted; they meet with coldness on all hands, and their remedy for
the coldness is self-assertion and brag. The Russian statesman was right
who remarked that modern Germany has been too early admitted into
the comity of European nations. Her behaviour, in her new
international relations, is like the behaviour of an uneasy, jealous
upstart in an old-fashioned quiet drawing-room. She has no genius for
equality; her manners are a compound of threatening and flattery.
When she wishes to assert herself, she bullies; when she wishes to
endear herself, she crawls; and the one device is no more successful

than the other.
Might is Right; but the sort of might which enables one nation to
govern another in time of peace is very unlike the armoured thrust of
the war-engine. It is a power compounded of sympathy and justice. The
English (it is admitted by many foreign critics) have studied justice and
desired justice. They have inquired into and protected rights that were
unfamiliar, and even grotesque, to their own ideas, because they
believed them to be rights. In the matter of sympathy their reputation
does not stand so high; they are chill in manner, and dislike all effusive
demonstrations of feeling. Yet those who come to know them know
that they are not unimaginative; they have a genius for equality; and
they do try to put themselves in the other fellow's place, to see how the
position looks from that side. What has happened in India may perhaps
be taken to prove, among many other things, that the inhabitants of
India begin to know that England has done her best, and does feel a
disinterested solicitude for the peoples under her charge. She has long
been a mother of nations, and is not frightened by the problems of
adolescence.
The Germans have as yet shown no sign of skill in governing other
peoples. Might is Right; and it is quite conceivable that they may
acquire colonies by violence. If they want to keep them they will have
to shut their own professors' books, and study the intimate history of
the British Empire. We are old hands at the business; we have lost more
colonies than ever they owned, and we begin to think that we have
learnt the secret of success. At any rate, our experience has done much
for us, and has helped us to avoid failure. Yet the German colonial
party stare at us with bovine malevolence. In all the library of German
theorizing you will look in vain for any explanation of the fact that the
Boers are, in the main, loyal to the British Empire. If German political
thinkers could understand that political situation, which seems to
English minds so simple, there