To the politician, devoted as he necessarily is to the exclusively human point of view, it may seem fantastic and scandalous to look for help in international policy to the conduct of dogs. The gulf between the two fields is not perhaps so impassably profound as he would like to think, but, however that may be, the analogy I have drawn is not unsupported by evidence of a more respectable kind. { 201} The susceptibility of the individual German to a harsh and even brutally enforced discipline is well known. The common soldier submits to be beaten by his sergeant, and is the better soldier for it; both submit to the bullying of their officer apparently also with profit; the common student is scarcely less completely subject to his professor, and becomes thereby a model of scientific excellence; the common citizen submits to the commands of his superiors, however unreasonably conceived and insultingly conveyed, and becomes a model of disciplined behaviour; finally the head of the State, combining the most drastic methods of the sergeant, the professor, and the official, wins not merely a slavish respect, but a veritable apotheosis.
Germany has shown unmistakably the way to her heart; it is for Europe to take it.
It is one of the most impressive facts about the war, that while Germany is the very type of a perfected aggressive herd, England is perhaps the most complete example of a socialized herd. Corresponding with this biological difference is the striking difference in their history. Germany has modelled her soul upon the wolf’s, and has rushed through the possibilities of her archetype in fifty feverish years of development; already she is a finished product, her moral ideal is fulfilled and leaves her nothing to strive for except the imposition of it upon the world. England has taken as her model the bee, and still lags infinitely far behind the fulfilment of her ideal. In the unbroken security of her land, for near a thousand years, she has leisurely, perhaps lazily, and with infinite slowness, pursued her path towards a social integration of an { 202} ever closer and deeper kind. She has stolidly, even stupidly, and always in a grossly practical spirit, held herself to the task of shaping a society in which free men could live and yet be citizens. She has had no theory of herself, no consciousness of her destiny, no will to power. She has had almost no national heroes, and has always been constitutionally frigid to her great men, grudging them the material for their experimentations on her people, indifferent to their expositions of her duty and her imperial destiny, granting them a chance to die for her with no more encouragement than an impatient sigh. She has allowed an empire to be won for her by her restless younger sons, has shown no gratification in their conquests, and so far from thrilling with the exultation of the conqueror, has always at the earliest moment set her new dominions at work upon the problem in which her wholly unromantic absorption has never relaxed. And after a thousand years she seems as far as ever from her goal. Her society is irregular, disorganized, inco-ordinate, split into classes at war with one another, weighted at one end with poverty, squalor, ignorance, and disease, weighted at the other end by ignorance, prejudice, and corpulent self-satisfaction. Nevertheless, her patience is no more shaken by what she is lectured upon as failure than was her composure by what she was assured was imperial success. She is no less bound by her fate than is Germany, and must continue her path until she reaches its infinitely remoter goal. Nations may model themselves on her expedients, and found the architecture of their liberty on the tabernacles she has set up by the wayside to rest in for a night—she will continue on her road unconscious of herself or her greatness, absent-mindedly polite to genius, pleasantly tickled by prophets with very loud voices, but apt to go to sleep under { 203} sermons, too awkward to boast or bluster, too composed to seem strong, too dull to be flattered, too patient to be flurried, and withal inflexibly practical and indifferent to dreams.