Another illustration of this lunatic quality in the German mind is found in the furious complaints against Great Britain for starving—or for even _trying_ to starve—Germany, including its women and children. And yet it was Germany that in 1870 drew lines of blockade around Paris, and waited for starvation to bring the ‘gay city’ to surrender! No German city yet has known the horrors of starvation as the German armies compelled Paris to know them. The death-rate of little children during those sad months rose to 5000 a week, and Bismarck, when he rode into Paris after its surrender, expressed his surprise at seeing _any_ children yet alive. Von Hindenburg, when told quite recently that Russian peasants were starving in Poland, said ‘It is just as well that it should be so; we cannot make war sentimentally.’ Then he repeated the formula which is the true credo of every Prussian soldier: ‘_The more ruthlessly war is waged, the more humane does it really become_; for that is the best way to bring it to a rapid conclusion.’ But what more complete proof of the one-sidedness of the German mind can be discovered than the fact, say, that at the present moment it is itself starving Belgium, so that its inhabitants have to be fed by the pity of the world, and at the same time it is screaming aloud to the whole universe because the meat ration in Berlin has to be reduced in consequence of the British blockade? The puzzle is not so much that Germany acts with such gaping inconsistency; it has not the faintest notion that it is inconsistent. This is a mental condition rare outside, and not even always found _inside_, a lunatic asylum. The delirious self-complacency of the Prussianised German, again, leaves the whole outside world speechless. There is no other such instance of megalomania in history. No other people pay such loud compliments to themselves, and pay them with such unashamed diligence. They decorate themselves with compliments as a savage decorates himself with bits of broken glass. A philosopher like Hegel set the example of proclaiming in German accents and to German ears the ‘godlike glory’ of the German nation. The ‘spiritual nature of Germanism,’ we are assured seven days a week by German editors, makes it the standard-bearer of Christian Europe. Morality, we are warned, ‘depends on the preservation of the Christian Germanic spirit and on the political power of Germany. Civilisation and Christianity are unthinkable without the Germans.’