“The binding cord is not force, but the deep-seated feeling of order that is possessed by us all.” (Hegel.) The new German philosophy has anointed the present immorality of States and thereby fixed it as the morality for individuals. I think these philosophers in their characteristic German exuberance, with its habit of over-statement, have been hard on Germany. For the German people at large have presumably been acquiring throughout the ages some such instincts toward altruism as the peoples of other countries. The new German philosophy has succeeded to a dismal extent in its inoculation of the German people, but it cannot in the long run impose its logical ideal of the wild man in the forest, though never so gorgeously decked out, on the Germans, any more than the old German philosophy made the Germans replicas of Christ. Man never attains to his philosophical ideal; but it is just as well that he should see clearly its apotheosis before he tries too hard to reach it. § 9. Our enemy now proclaims that his objective is the crushing of Britain’s world-power in the interests of mankind. Are we justified in retaining if we can what, in a by no means unstained past, we have acquired, or should we hand over our position, well and ill-gotten, to this new claimant, with his new culture, for the benefit of the world? Man has a somewhat incurable belief that he can manage his own affairs, and we Britons hold the faith that our character, ideals, and experience fit us to control our own lives and property for the general good of mankind, side by side with other nations of like mind. The fortunate possessors of the greater Empire and the greater trade are not perhaps the most convincing advocates of the principle “Live and let live.” For all that, we find it impossible to admit the right of any nation to an aggressive policy toward us. Germany, after being petrified with surprise at our intervention, now accuses us of having planned the war and deliberately attacked her. It is divinely easy to claim things both ways when you are at war. We all see just now rather as in a glass darkly. And yet, with an immense Empire, an immense trade, and nothing that we wanted anywhere, with a crop of serious social and political troubles on hand, “a contemptible little army,” a tradition of abstention from European quarrels, a Free Trade policy, a democratic system of government, a Foreign Minister remarkable up to then for his services to peace, and a “degenerate, wealth-rotted, huckstering” population, it still seems to us (always excepting our handful of pre-war Jingoes) as improbable as it once seemed to Germany that we hatched and set on foot such a wildcat enterprise. § 10.