According to his interpretation of history, the case of Germany is perfectly plain. It is simply an instance of the degeneracy that, he claimed, inevitably follows the adoption of selfish or materialistic ambitions. The patient industry and the steady pursuit of the practical instead of the spectacular brought Germany to greatness, and placed vast power in the hands of her rulers. Then those rulers were tempted to misuse that power, and they fell. They decided to corrupt the people and make them the instrument by which world dominion could be achieved. They therefore cultivated the baser passions of the populace, and with infinite thoroughness and resource, they used every agency of the government to secure public endorsement for a policy of aggression, and for a swash-buckling and bombastic procedure that appealed only to the shallow and the reckless. They found this the easier because circumstances worked with them. The Franco-Prussian War inflamed German chauvinism and inflated German conceit to an incredible extent. The success of the war was more the result of France's weakness than Germany's strength, but it filled the German nation with extravagant enthusiasm, and inspired it with blind faith in its own invincibility. Then Germany changed from a country largely agricultural to one mainly industrial, and wealth came to kindle in a naturally gross and sensual people a passion for luxury, and to impart to a naturally arrogant one the insolence of material power. The effect of the first of these things is shown in the famous night-life of Berlin, which, before the war, was more gross and lavish than that of any other city in the world; while the overbearing character of the average German abroad shows how general was the influence of the second. Thus a change has been effected in the spirit of Germany. From a nation dull but honest, rude but sincere and kindly, it has been transformed by bad leadership and sudden prosperity into a people whose dominant characteristics are brutality and mendacity. Therefore the Germany that Carlyle praised is not the Germany that perpetrated the present war, and there is no doubt that his attitude towards the apostles of Kultur would be the direct opposite of what it was towards Frederick the Great and Bismarck.