In one sense, Germany is rich in intellectual ability—the Germany to which Beethoven sang, and Goethe discoursed philosophy, for which Kant moralised, and at which Heine jested. It has a list of names great in poetry, philosophy, and scholarship. Germany, too, has done great things in science, though not so much in the realm of scientific discovery. It adapts rather than discovers; it excels in translating the scientific discoveries of other races into practical terms. Noticeable, also, is the fact that the great names in German literature, philosophy, and scholarship are not Prussian; and it is Prussia, and the Prussianised form of Germany, which is troubling the world. Luther came from Eisleben; Leibnitz was a Czech; Kant was of Scottish blood; Bismarck, it is amusing to remember, told Prince Napoleon, ‘I am _not_ a German; I am a Prussian, a Wend’—that is, a Slav. Both Nietzsche and Treitschke came of a Slav stock; most of the great ‘German’ musicians came of a Jewish strain; Heine was, of course, a pure Jew. Nearly all the public documents issued by the German Government during this war, and all the speeches of its statesmen, are thick-inlaid with statements which, if not blank lies, and known by the speaker or writer to be lies, are yet proofs of some disordered quality in the mind of the speaker or writer. Sometimes the speaker seems to be self-hypnotised, so that he really believes a lie as big as a mountain to be the truth; or he suffers from some eccentric paralysis of the memory which enables him to forget what he has said, or written, only a moment before. The famous ‘scrap of paper’ incident, taken as a whole, has the office of a searchlight as showing the morbid condition both of German morals and of German intelligence. Anybody with a touch of literary imagination will look back upon that scene in a room in Berlin, when the German Chancellor complained to Sir Edward Goschen, ‘You are going to war with us over a scrap of paper,’ and recognise it as one of the most picturesque, as well as the great and critical, moments in history. The German represented the greatest military Power in the world, the Englishman the greatest naval Power. Had both agreed to dismiss as a mere ‘scrap of paper’ the treaty that guards the neutrality of Belgium, the sanctity of all treaties would have disappeared at a breath.