Consider the names of the chief exponents of the aggressive German idea, and you will find that not one is German. The first begetter of Nietzsche's "blond beast," and of all that great flood of rubbish about a strange superior race with whitish hair and blue eyes, that has so fatally rotted the German imagination, was a Frenchman named Gobineau. We British are not altogether free from the disease. As a small boy I read the History of J.R. Green, and fed my pride upon the peculiar virtues of my Anglo-Saxon blood. ("Cp.," as they say in footnotes, Carlyle and Froude.) It was not a German but a renegade Englishman of the Englishman-hating Whig type, Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who carried the Gobineau theory to that delirious level which claims Dante and Leonardo as Germans, and again it was not a German but a British peer, still among us, Lord Redesdale, who in his eulogistic preface to the English translation of Chamberlain's torrent of folly, hinted not obscurely that the real father of Christ was not the Jew, Joseph, but a much more Germanic person. Neither Clausewitz, who first impressed upon the German mind the theory of ruthless warfare, nor Bernhardi, nor Treitschke, who did as much to build up the Emperor's political imagination, strike one as bearing particularly German names. There are indeed very grave grounds for the German complaint that Germany has been the victim of alien flattery and alien precedents. And what after all is the Prussian dream of world empire but an imitative response to the British empire and the adventure of Napoleon? The very title of the German emperor is the name of an Italian, Caesar, far gone in decay. And the backbone of the German system at the present time is the Prussian, who is not really a German at all but a Germanised Wend. Take away the imported and imposed elements from the things we fight to-day, leave nothing but what is purely and originally German, and you leave very little. We fight dynastic ambition, national vanity, greed, and the fruits of fifty years of basely conceived and efficiently conducted education.