_Kultur_ is a difficult word to interpret. It means "culture" and a great deal more besides. Its primary meaning, like that of "culture," is intellectual and aesthetic: when a German speaks of "Kultur" he is thinking of such things as language, literature, philosophy, education, art, science, and the like. Children in German schools are taught a subject called _Kulturgeschichte_ (culture-history), and under that heading they are told about German literature, German philosophy and religion, German painting, German music and so on. So far, the English and the German uses of the word roughly correspond. We should probably be surprised if we heard it said that Shakespeare had made a contribution to English "culture": but, on consideration, we should admit that he had, though we should not have chosen that way of speaking about him. But there is a further meaning in the word _Kultur_, which explains why it is so often on German lips. It means, not only the product of the intellect or imagination, but the product of the disciplined intellect and the disciplined imagination. _Kultur_ has in it an element of order, of organisation, of civilisation. That is why the Germans regard the study of the "culture" of a country as part of the study of its history. English school children are beginning to be taught social and industrial history in addition to the kings and queens and battles and constitutions which used to form the staple of history lessons. They are being taught, that is, to see the history of their country, and of its civilisation, in the light of the life and livelihood of its common people. The German outlook is different. They look at their history in the light of the achievements of its great minds, which are regarded as being at once the proof and the justification of its civilisation. To the question, "What right have you to call yourselves a civilised country?" an Englishman would reply, "Look at the sort of people we are, and at the things we have done," and would point perhaps to the extracts from the letters of private soldiers printed in the newspapers, or to the story of the growth of the British Empire; a German would reply (as Germans are indeed replying now), "Look at our achievements in scholarship and science, at our universities, at our systems of education, at our literature, our music, and our painting; at our great men of thought and imagination: at Luther, Dürer, Goethe, Beethoven, Kant." _Kultur_ then means more than "culture": it means _culture considered as the most important element in civilisation._ It implies the disciplined education which alone, in the German view, makes the difference between the savage and the civilised man. It implies the heritage of intellectual possessions which, thanks to ordered institutions, a nation is able to hand down from generation to generation.