What makes the tragedy of Germany in this war, the thing which puzzles even those who are fighting against it, is the fact that Germany is acting on a doctrine stranger and more terrible than Paganism itself. It undertakes to be _both_ Christian and Pagan at the same time; Christian in the individual life, Pagan as a nation. It has two eternally hostile codes of ethics: one for the individual and the other for the State. As a private citizen the German may be a Christian, and ought to be one; but the moment he puts on a spike-helmet, or sits at a Government desk, he strips himself of all Christian morals; vice and virtue change their names for him. As a soldier he can clothe himself with ‘frightfulness’; can rape, plunder, kill, burn, with the entire approval of his official—that is to say, his Paganised—conscience. As a diplomatist, he can lie and cheat and forswear himself, and leave his Christian self-respect untouched. For Germany acts on the theory that the State is a non-moral, predatory entity, for which the distinction betwixt good and evil does not exist. It stands in no relation to God; it has no more morals than a tiger; it acts on the law of the jungle. Might, in its dreadful code, is right. In the Prussianised Germany against which we are fighting we have, in brief, a double personality. When it acts as a nation it undergoes a transformation more terrible than that in R. L. Stevenson’s tale when Dr. Jekyll turned into Mr. Hyde. All the separate individualities of Germany melt into one gigantic Mr. Hyde—Mr. Hyde in a spike-helmet. Or, to change the figure, they become the ‘great blond beast’ of Nietzsche, lawless, predatory, invincible, the superman, a non-moral monster. The supermen, says Nietzsche, ‘where a foreign country begins, revert to the beast-of-prey conscience, like jubilant monsters who come with bravado from a ghastly bout of murder, arson, rape, and torture.... The nation becomes a magnificent blond brute, avidly rampant for spoil and victory.’ Treitschke, the little stone-deaf professor of history, proclaimed the doctrine that the State is a non-moral entity, for which an ethical code has no meaning. Bernhardi puts the matter more explicitly. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he says, ‘came into the world to establish a society founded on love; but that principle does not extend to the State’; in all that concerns the State, Jesus Christ has no authority. His laws do not extend to _that_ realm. When before in history have we this doctrine proclaimed from the iron lips of 17-inch howitzers? Here lies the explanation of all that puzzles us in the present war—the strange perversities discoverable in German policy: its contempt for truth, its capacity for cruelty; its blindness to moral distinctions. We are fighting with a nation which, taken individually, believes itself to be Christian; but, taken as a nation, it is by deliberate choice Pagan.