en the alternatives revealed themselves as possible and actual, then
we all turned republican, even to the cottagers in Pomerania. When the
military strike had broken down discipline, the officers were
mishandled; when the war was lost, the fleet disgraced, and the
homeland defiled, then we began to play and dance.

But was this frivolity? Not at all; it was a childish want of
political imagination. The Poles, a people not remotely comparable to
the German in depth of soul and the capacity for training talent, have
for a century cherished no other thought than that of national unity,
while we passively resign our territories. No Englishman or Japanese
or American will ever understand us when we tell him that this
military discipline of ours, this war-lust, did not represent a
passion for dominion and aggression, but was merely the docility of a
childish people which wants nothing, and can imagine nothing, but that
things should go on as they happen, at the moment, to be.

We Germans know but little of the laws which govern the formation of
national character. The capacity of a people for profundity is not
profundity, either of the individual or of the community. It may
express itself in the masses as mere plasticity and softness of
spirit. The capacity for collective sagacity and strength of will
demands from the individual merely a dry intelligence in human
affairs, and egoism. It would be too much to say that our political
weakness may be merely the expression of spiritual power, for the
latter has not proved an obstacle to success in business. Indolence
and belief in authority have their share in it.

But have we not been the classic land of social democracy, and have we
not become that of Radicalism? Well, we have been, indeed, and are,
with our submissiveness to authority and our capacity for discipline,
the classic land of organized grumbling; and the classic land, too, of
anti-semitism which deprived us of the very forces we stood most in
need of--productive scepticism and the imagination for concrete
things. Organized grumbling is not the same thing as political
creation. A Socialism and Radicalism poorer in ideas than the
post-Marxian German Socialism has never existed. Half of it was merely
clerical work, and the other half was agitators' Utopianism of the
cheapest variety.

Nothing was more significant than the fact that the mighty event of
the German Revolution was not the result of affection but of
dis