was this thing to which we trusted? And how may we most quickly
explain its development from a dream to a nightmare, and the
hair's-breadth escape by which it did not hurl us to destruction, as it
seems to be hurling the Turk? It is a certain spirit; and we must not
ask for too logical a definition of it, for the people whom it possesses
disown logic; and the whole thing is not so much a theory as a confusion
of thought. Its widest and most elementary character is adumbrated in
the word Teutonism or Pan-Germanism; and with this (which was what
appeared to win in 1870) we had better begin. The nature of
Pan-Germanism may be allegorised and abbreviated somewhat thus:

The horse asserts that all other creatures are morally bound to
sacrifice their interests to his, on the specific ground that he
possesses all noble and necessary qualities, and is an end in himself.
It is pointed out in answer that when climbing a tree the horse is less
graceful than the cat; that lovers and poets seldom urge the horse to
make a noise all night like the nightingale; that when submerged for
some long time under water, he is less happy than the haddock; and that
when he is cut open pearls are less often found in him than in an
oyster. He is not content to answer (though, being a muddle-headed
horse, he does use this answer also) that having an undivided hoof is
more than pearls or oceans or all ascension or song. He reflects for a
few years on the subject of cats; and at last discovers in the cat "the
characteristic equine quality of caudality, or a tail"; so that cats
_are_ horses, and wave on every tree-top the tail which is the equine
banner. Nightingales are found to have legs, which explains their power
of song. Haddocks are vertebrates; and therefore are sea-horses. And
though the oyster outwardly presents dissimilarities which seem to
divide him from the horse, he is by the all-filling nature-might of the
same horse-moving energy sustained.

Now this horse is intellectually the wrong horse. It is not perhaps
going too far to say that this horse is a donkey. For it is obviously
within even the intellectual resources of a haddock to answer, "But if a
haddock is a horse, why should I yield to you any more than you to me?
Why should that singing horse commonly called the nightingale, or that
climbing horse hitherto known as the cat, fall down and worship you
because of your horsehood? If all our native faculties are the
accomplishments o