Our incomprehension is partly due to that strange disbelief in the power of ideas to which we already referred, which remains such a marked trait of the British people, even as it was a marked trait of the Roman people, and which is perhaps characteristic of all nations who are pre-eminent in action, in colonization and empire-building. This disbelief partly explains why we have revealed such strange impotence in fighting our spiritual battles. Our Churches have remained silent and inarticulate. Our statesmen have seldom risen above sentimental platitudes. No trumpet voice has vindicated our ideas to the world. Our writers, with a few notable exceptions, such as Mr. Gilbert Chesterton and Mr. Wells, have seldom risen above trite truisms. This war has not even produced a masterpiece such as Burke’s “Thoughts on the French Revolution.”
But our incomprehension is due even more to our ignorance of the strange and devious workings of the German mind. Even to-day few authors understand the reasons which render the German people so responsive and so docile to the most extravagant doctrines and systems. The British are a political people; and a political people only accepts theories in so far as they can be verified, interpreted, and corrected by experience, only in so far as they can be tested by the fire of discussion. The German people, as even Prince von Bülow is compelled to admit, have remained an essentially unpolitical people. They still are under the yoke of countless princelings. There still exist sovereign potentates of Lippe and Waldeck, of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen and Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt. The Germans have acquired none of the habits and traditions of free government. But, most important of all, their religion has acted in the same direction as their politics. They are described by Treitschke as the typical Protestant nation; but the misfortune of German Protestantism has been that it has never “protested.” Through the fusion and confusion of Church and State the Germans have sold their spiritual birthright for a mess of pottage. Their spiritual life has been almost entirely divorced from action. It has been centred in the intellect and in the emotions. It has moved in a world of abstraction and dreams.