Between the pride of England and the pride of France there are certain well-marked differences. But both, because of their ancient histories, have pride of race, wholesomely tempered by the consciousness that _noblesse oblige_. Germany has the much more aggressive pride of the successful _parvenu_. Having made herself, within the memory of people now living, she looked upon her work with all the pride of the self-made man, and saw that it was good—after its kind—and straightway aspired to re-make the whole world after her own image and according to her own material conceptions. To do that she thought, quite wrongly, that it was necessary first to subdue it by the sword. She would have been wiser to keep it in its sheath. Her peaceful invasion was far more penetrating and far more likely to compass the end she had in view of making her the dominating nation of the earth. All the world takes her Kultur now at its proper value. But long before the war, up to the very eve of its declaration, German influence, and above all German finance and commerce, had been permeating all the nations now at war with her, as well as all the neutral states, like bindweed and Virginia Creeper running riot in a suburban garden. If the war had not come the independent existence of some of them—Switzerland, for example—would certainly have been choked. Even the larger countries were beginning to suffer. In England the phrase, “Made in Germany,” first an economic measure of self-protection, then a rather feeble joke, and then a byword, was fast becoming a serious menace—if one accepts as just the principle of England for the English—to the real interests of the country. In France, in England, and in other countries there were too many commercial houses and too many people and too many opinions made in Germany, if those countries were to retain their national characteristics and national liberty of thought and action. The seriousness of the mischief in its gravest form all the world has seen lately in the United States, where the Government have had to struggle hard, and not always with success, against the crippling influence of the fear of the German vote, even though, happier than the neutral states of Europe, they were entirely free from the parallel influence—the fear of the German sword.