he parasites of the larger States, who ensure their prosperity and
security and bear all the brunt of maintaining law and order in
Europe.

But worse even than the small States is the neutral State. A neutral
State in political life is as much a monstrosity as a neutral sexless
animal in the natural world. A State like Belgium is only the parasite
of the larger neighbouring States. Treitschke never mentions Belgium
without an outburst of contempt. The country of Memlinck and van Eyck,
of Rubens and van Dyck, the country whose people in the present war
have borne the first onslaught of all the Teutonic hosts, are never
mentioned by Treitschke except with a sneer.

In no other part of his political system does Treitschke show more
sublime disregard of all those political facts which do not fit in
with his theories. No other part more conclusively proves how the
tyrannical dogma of Prussian nationalism can blind even a profound and
clear-sighted thinker to the most vital historical realities. It must
be apparent _a priori_ to any student of politics that the life of
small communities must gain in concentration and intensity what it
loses in scope and extent. And it must be obvious that small States
have played a much more conspicuous part than the most powerful
empires. The city of Dante, Machiavelli, Michael Angelo, has done more
for culture than all the might and majesty of the Hohenzollern.
Humanity is indebted to one small State--Palestine--for its religion.
To another small State--Greece--humanity owes the beginning of all art
and the foundations of politics. To other small States--Holland and
Scotland--modern Europe is indebted for its political freedom. And are
not the German people themselves indebted for the glories of their
literature to the contemptible cities of Jena and Weimar?

XXIV.

We have explained the main tenets of the Treitschkean creed. Even
after this exhaustive analysis it will be difficult for an English
reader to understand how such a system, if we divest it of its
rhetoric, of its fervid and impassioned style, and of a wealth of
historical illustration, which has been able to ransack every country
and every age, could ever have inspired a policy and could have
hypnotized so completely a highly intelligent and gifted race.

Our incomprehension is partly due to that strange disbelief in the
power of ideas to which we already referred, which remains such a
marked trait of the British people,