rsities (and many other
cliques) of England, even largely in the United States, a theory had
grown and prospered that something called "the Teutonic race" was the
origin of all we valued; that another thing, called in one aspect "the
Latin" or in another aspect "the Celt," was something in the one case
worn out, in the other negligible through folly, instability, and
decay. The wildest history gathered round this absurd legend, not only
among the Germans but wherever the "Teutonic theory" flourished, and
the fatuous vanity of the North German was fed by the ceaseless
acceptance of that legend on the part of those who believed themselves
to be his kinsmen.

They still believe it. In every day that passes the press of Great
Britain reveals the remains of this foolery. And while the real
person, England, is at grips with another real thing, Prussia, which
is determined to kill her by every means in its power, the empty
theorizing of professors who do not see _things_, but only the
imaginary figures of their theories, continues to regard England as in
some way under a German debt, and subject to the duty of admiring her
would-be murderer.

Before leaving this digression, I would further remind the reader
that nowhere in the mass of the British population is this strange
theory of German supremacy accepted, and that outside the countries I
have named not even the academic classes consider it seriously. In the
eyes of the Frenchman, the Italian, and the Pole, the North German is
an inferior. His numbers and his equipment for war do not affect that
sentiment, for it is recognized that all he has and does are the
product of a lesson carefully learned, and that his masters always
were and still are the southern and the western nations, with their
vastly more creative spirit, their hardier grip in body as in mind,
their cleaner souls, and their more varied and developed ideals.

If this was the mood of the German people when the war in its first
intense moment had, as it were, cast into a permanent form the molten
popular soul, what was that of the nation which the Germans knew in
their hearts, in spite of the most pitiable academic illusion, to be
the permanent and implacable enemy--I mean the French people?

Comprehend the mood of the French, contrast and oppose it to that of
the Germans, and you will have viewed almost in its entirety the
spiritual theatre of this gigantic struggle. No don's talk of "Slav"
or "Teuton," of