Where, now, is that "deep, patient Germany" of which Carlyle wrote? Was ever a nation's soul so perverted, so fallen from grace! Read this mass of bombast--learned bombast of professors, vulgar bombast of Lokal-Anzeigers and the like, but always bombast. Wade through the prophetic books with their assumption that Britain must perish and Germany succeed her; consult the scolding articles and lectures, so narrow, ungenerous, and boastful in their tone, so utterly wanting in the deeper historical knowledge or true reading of a rival's character; see the insane Pan-German maps, with their partitions of Europe for the year 1915 or thereabouts; study the lectures of the crazy professors, with their absurd assumption of accurate knowledge and their extraordinary knack of getting every fact as wrong as it could possibly be--take all this together, and then say whether any nation has ever in this world been so foolishly and utterly misled as have the Germans. I have alluded to their knack of getting everything wrong. It is perfectly miraculous. One would not have thought it possible that people could be _always_ wrong. So blinded have they been by hate that everything was distorted. Never even by accident did they stumble upon the truth. Let us take a list of their confident assertions--things so self-evident that they were taken for granted by the average journalist: "The British Army was worthless; its presence on the Continent, even if it could come, was immaterial. "Britain herself was absolutely decadent. "Britain's commerce could be ruined by the German cruisers. "The United States would fall upon us if we were in trouble. "Canada and Australia were longing to break away from the Empire. "India loathed us. "The Boers were eager to reconquer South Africa. "The Empire was an artificial collection of States which must fly to pieces at the first shock." This was the nonsense which grave Berlin Professors of History ladled out to their receptive students. The sinister Treitschke, who is one of half a dozen men who have torn down Imperial Germany just as surely as Roon, Bismarck, and Moltke built it up, was the arch-priest of this cult. Like Nietzsche, whose moral teaching was the supplement to the Pan-German Material doctrine, Treitschke was not, by extraction, a German at all. Both men were of the magnetic Slav stock, dreamers of dreams and seers of visions--evil dreams and dark visions for the land in which they dwelt. With their magic flutes they have led the whole blind, foolish, conceited nation down that easy, pleasant path which ends in this abyss.