The very antithesis between _Helden_ (heroes) and _Händler_ (hucksters), with which all Germany is ringing, is an illustration of the romantic quality that vitiates their intelligence. In spite of the fact that they are one of the greatest trading and manufacturing nations of the world, and that precisely the fear of losing their trade and markets has been, as they constantly assert, a chief cause that has driven them to war, they speak as though Germany were a kind of knight-errant, innocent of all material ambitions, wandering through the world in the pure, disinterested service of God and man. On the other hand, because England is a great commercial Power, they suppose that no Englishman lives for anything but profit. Because they themselves have conscription, and have to fight or be shot, they infer that every German is a noble warrior. Because the English volunteer, they assume that they only volunteer for their pay. Germany, to them, is a hero clad in white armour, magnanimous, long-suffering, and invincible. Other nations are little seedy figures in black coats, inspired exclusively by hatred and jealousy of the noble German, incapable of a generous emotion or an honourable act, and destined, by the judgment of history, to be saved, if they can be saved at all, by the great soul and dominating intellect of the Teuton. It is in this intoxicating atmosphere of temperament and mood that the ideas and ambitions of German imperialists work and move. They are essentially the same as those of imperialists in other countries. Their philosophy of history assumes an endless series of wars, due to the inevitable expansion of rival States. Their ethics means a belief in force and a disbelief in everything else. Their science is a crude misapplication of Darwinism, combined with invincible ignorance of the true bearings of science upon life, and especially of those facts and deductions about biological heredity which, once they are understood, will make it plain that war degrades the stock of all nations, victorious and vanquished alike, and that the decline of civilizations is far more plausibly to be attributed to this cause than to the moral decadence of which history is always ready, after the event, to accuse the defeated Power. One peculiarity, perhaps, there is in the outlook of German imperialism, and that is its emphasis on an unintelligible and unreal abstraction of "race." Germans, it is thought, are by biological quality the salt of the earth. Every really great man in Europe, since the break-up of the Roman Empire, has been a German, even though it might appear, at first sight, to an uninstructed observer, that he was an Italian or a Frenchman or a Spaniard. Not all Germans, however, are, they hold, as yet included in the German Empire, or even in the German-Austrian combination. The Flemish are Germans, the Dutch are Germans, the English even are Germans, or were before the war had made them, in Germany's eyes, the offscouring