Is my anthology as it stands open to a telling _tu quoque_ by means of a selection of gems from British books and pamphlets of the type of those from which I have made my gleanings? Is it a case of the mote and the beam? I think we may be pretty confident that it is not. I doubt whether the literature of the world can show a parallel to the amazing outburst of tribal arrogance, unrestrained and unashamed, of which these pages contain but a few scattered specimens. In the extracts from literature "Before the War" (which have always been kept apart from those which date from "After July, 1914"), the reader may see this habit of mind growing and gathering strength: the declaration of war opens the floodgates, and the torrent rushes forth, grandiose, overwhelming, and, I believe, unique. I know of only one English book in which the German taste and temper is emulated. It is certainly a deplorable production; but it is the work of a wholly unknown man, whereas many of the most incredible utterances in the following pages proceed from men of world-wide reputation. Indeed, few contemporary German names of much distinction are absent from my list. Wilamowitz-Möllendorf, Harnack, Wundt, Oncken, Eucken, Haeckel, Naumann, Rohrbach, Sombart, Liszt, all join with a will in the chorus of arrogance, ambition, and hate. Many quotations come from a series of pamphlets called _Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit_, to which all the most eminent professors of Berlin University have contributed, with some from other universities. I have also, no doubt, culled passages from a good many nobodies and busybodies; but when the nobodies and the somebodies are found to echo and re-echo each other, the inference is that the general tone of the public mind is very fairly represented. It will be noted that many of the wildest shrieks of self-glorification and ferocity proceed from clerics and theologians.
The world as a whole has been curiously blind to the inordinate self-valuation characteristic of the German spirit. So long ago as the beginning of last century, we find Fichte assuring his countrymen that: "There are no two ways about it: if you founder, the whole of humanity founders with you, without hope of any possible restoration." Even Heine, in the preface to "Deutschland" (1844) could write half-jestingly that "if only the Germans would out-soar the French in deeds, as they already had in thought," and if they would carry out in their spiritual and political life some rather vaguely indicated reforms, "not only Alsace and Lorraine, but all France, all Europe, the whole world, would become German." "I often dream," he adds, "of this mission, this universal dominance of Germany." Of course we are not to write Heine down a Pan-German of the modern, realistic type. There is more than a dash of irony in this passage--he obviously implies that there is very little chance of Germany fulfilling the conditions that he lays down as indispensable to her world-domination. Nevertheless, there is a sinister significance in the fact that a spirit like his should be found dallying for a moment with dreams of world-supremacy. It was, of course, the war of 1870, with its resounding triumphs, that brought these visions, so to speak, within the range of practical politics. For fifteen or twenty years, Germany was, as Bismarck said, "sated"; but with the coming of the youthful, pushful, self-assertive Kaiser, her aggressive instincts re-awakened and she fell to brooding over the idea that her incomparable physical and spiritual energies were cabin'd, cribb'd, confined. The rapid growth of her population reinforced this idea, and the increase of her wealth, as was natural, only made her greedy for more. The result was that she gave her soul over in fatal earnest to an ambitious and grasping tribalism to which she was, from of old, only too prone. The Pan-Germans were the Uhlans, the stormy petrels, of the movement; but the whole mind of the nation was in reality carried away by it, save for a very small section which was conscious of its dangers and feebly protested. The egoism of which she was constantly accusing other nations, ran riot in her own breast, was elevated into a political virtue, and expressed itself on the spiritual side in a towering racial vanity. The word "deutsch," always a word of magical properties, became the synonym of an unapproachable superiority in every walk of life[2]--a superiority that sanctified aggression and made domination a duty. In many minds, no doubt, these sentiments wore a decent mask; but the moment war broke out, the mask dropped off, with the amazing results very imperfectly mirrored in the following pages.