Most external commentators on modern German life have called attention to the harshness which is apt to pervade social relations. They tell us of an atmosphere of fierce competition, of ruthless {183} scandalmongering and espionage, of insistence upon minute distinctions of rank and title, of a rigid ceremonious politeness which obviously has little relation to courtesy, of a deliberate cultivation by superiors of a domineering harshness towards their inferiors, of habitual cruelty to animals, and indeed of the conscious, deliberate encouragement of harshness and hardness of manner and feeling as laudable evidences of virility. The statistics of crime, the manners of officials, the tone of newspapers, the ferocious discipline of the Army, and the general belief that personal honour is stained by endurance and purified by brutality are similar phenomena. Nothing in this category, however, is more illuminating than the treatment by Germany of colonies and conquered territories. To the English the normal method of treating a conquered country is to obliterate, as soon as possible, every trace of conquest, and to assimilate the inhabitants to the other citizens of the empire by every possible indulgence of liberty and self-government. It is, therefore, difficult for him to believe that the German actually likes to be reminded that a given province has been conquered, and is not unwilling that a certain amount of discontent and restiveness in the inhabitants should give him opportunities of forcibly exercising his dominion and resuscitating the glories of conquest. Although this fact has no doubt been demonstrated countless times, it was first displayed unmistakably to the world in the famous Zabern incident. Those who have studied the store of psychological material furnished by that affair, the trial and judgments which followed it, and the ultimate verdict of the people thereon, cannot fail to have reached the conclusion that here is exposed in a crucial experiment a people which is either totally incomprehensible, or is responding to the calls of herd instinct by a series of reactions almost {184} totally different from those we regard as normal. When the biological key to the situation is discovered the series of events otherwise bizarre to the pitch of incredibility becomes not only intelligible and consistent, but also inevitable.