That was a logical corollary of the root-principle of Pan-Germanism. Germany’s necessity, of which her own Kaiser, statesmen, diplomatists, and generals are the best judges, knows no law. Every treaty, every obligation, every duty has to vanish before it: the Treaty of Bucharest, establishing equilibrium in the Balkans, as well as the Treaty of 1839, safeguarding the neutrality of Belgium. Hence nobody conversant with the nature, growth, and spread of this new militant race-worship was in the least surprised at the Chancellor’s contempt for the scrap of paper and for the simple-minded statesmen who proclaimed its binding force. I certainly was not. Experience had familiarized me with these German doctrines and practices; and although my experience was more constant and striking than that of our public men who had spent most of their lives in Great Britain, they, too, had had tokens enough of the new ethics which Prussia had imported into her international policy to put them on their guard against what was coming. But nobody is so blind as he who will not see. Pan-Germanism, then, is become a racial religion, and to historical and other sciences has been confided the task of demonstrating its truth. But if curiosity prompts us to inquire to what race its military apostles, the Prussians, belong, and to interrogate history and philology on the subject, we find that they are not Germans at all. This fact appears to have escaped notice here. The Prussians are members of a race which in the ethnic groups of European Aryans occupy a place midway between the Slavs and the Teutons. Their next-of-kin are the Lithuanians and the Letts. The characteristic traits of the old Prussians, the surviving fragments of whose language I was once obliged to study, are brutal arrogance towards those under them, and cringing servility towards their superiors. One has but to turn to the political history of the race to gather abundant illustrations of these distinctive marks. To the submissiveness of the masses is to be attributed the ease with which the leaders of the nation drilled it into a vast fighting machine, whose members often and suddenly changed sides without murmur or criticism at the bidding of their chief. And it was with this redoubtable weapon that the Hohenzollern dynasty, which itself is German, won for the State over which it presided territory and renown. This done, and done thoroughly, it was Prussia who experimented upon all Germany in the way in which the Hohenzollerns had experimented on Prussia; and being supported by the literary, artistic, and scientific elements of the German people, succeeded thus far, and might have ended by realizing their ambitious dream, had it not been for the interposition of circumstance which misled them in their choice of opportunity.