Such criticism has not always been very effectually answered, and the generally current feeling has proved disconcertingly inarticulate in the presence of its agile and well-equipped opponents. Indeed, upon the ordinary assumptions of political debate, it is doubtful whether any quite satisfactory answer {196} can be produced. It is just, however, these very assumptions which must be abandoned and replaced by more appropriate psychological principles when we are trying to obtain light upon the relations of two peoples of profoundly different social type and instinctive reaction. The common man seems to be dimly aware of this difference though he cannot define it; the intellectual of what, for want of a better term, I may call the pacifist type in all its various grades, proceeds upon the assumption that no such difference exists. Much as one must respect the courage and capacity of many of these latter, one cannot but recognize that their conceptions, however logical and however ingenious, lack the invigorating contact with reality which the instinctive feelings of the common man have not altogether failed to attain. Let us now consider what guidance in the solution of the problem can be got from a consideration of the peculiarities of the social type which the Germans of the present day so characteristically present. Regarded from this point of view, the war is seen to be directed against a social type which, when endowed with the technical resources of modern civilization, is, and must continue to be, a dangerous anachronism. A people of the aggressive social habit can never be in a state of stable equilibrium with its neighbours. The constitution of its society presents a rigid barrier to smooth and continuous internal integration; its energy, therefore, must be occupied upon essentially, though not always superficially, external objects, and its history will necessarily be made up of alternating periods of aggression and periods of preparation. Such a people has no conception of the benign use of power. It must regard war as an end in itself, as the summit of its national activities, as the recurring apogee {197} of its secular orbit; it must regard peace as a necessary and somewhat irksome preparation for war in which it may savour reminiscently the joys of conquest by dragooning its new territories and drastically imposing upon them its national type. This instinctive insistence upon uniformity makes every conquest by such a people an impoverishment of the human race, and makes the resistance of such aggression an elementary human duty. In every particular Germany has proved true to her social type, and every detail of her history for the last fifty years betrays the lupine quality of her ideals and her morals.