When we push our examination further, into the means which Germany has been urged by her great thinkers to employ in preparing for this premeditated war, for provoking it when the season should be ripe, {135} and for securing victory and spoils, we are struck more than ever by the gulf which separates the ideas of the German pedantocracy from those of the rest of the world. Nor can we fail to be impressed by the matter-of-fact and businesslike way in which the military and civil powers have set to work to translate those notions into practice. [Sidenote: A POLITICAL PRIESTHOOD] No kind of priesthood has ever yet exercised a great and direct influence upon national policy without producing calamity. And by an ill fate, it has always been the nature of these spiritual guides to clutch at political power whenever it has come within their reach. Of all classes in the community who are intellectually capable of having ideas upon public affairs, a priesthood--or what is the same thing, a pedantocracy--is undoubtedly the most mischievous, if it succeeds in obtaining power. It matters not a whit whether they thunder forth their edicts and incitements from church pulpits or university chairs, whether they carry their sophistical projects up the back stairs of Catholic King or Lutheran Kaiser, whether, having shaved their heads and assumed vows of celibacy, they dwell in ancient cloisters, or, having taken unto themselves wives and begotten children, they keep house in commonplace villa residences. None of these differences is essential, or much worth considering. The one class is as much a priesthood as the other, and the evils which proceed from the predominance of the one, and the other, are hardly distinguishable. They stand ostentatiously aloof from the sordid competitions of worldly business. They have forsworn, or at any rate forgone, the ordinary prizes of {136} wealth and position. And for these very reasons they are ill equipped for guiding practical affairs. Their abstinences are fatal impediments, and render them apt to leave human nature out of their reckoning. They are wanting in experience of the difficulties which beset ordinary men, and of the motives which influence them. Knowing less of such matters (for all their book learning) than any other class of articulately-speaking men, they find it by so much the easier to lay down rules and regulations for the government of the world.