e the Frenchman is the artist,
always painting and repainting France like a house. No state of social
good that does not mean the Citizen _choosing_ good, as well as getting
it, has the idea of the Citizen at all. To say the Germanies are
naturally at war with this idea is merely to respect them and take them
seriously: otherwise their war on the French Revolution would be only an
ignorant feud. It is this, to them, risky and fanciful notion of the
critical and creative Citizen, which in 1870 lay prostrate under United
Germany--under the undivided hoof.

Nevertheless, when the German says he has or loves freedom, what he says
is not false. He means something; and what he means is the second
principle, which I may summarise as the Irresponsibility of Thought.
Within the iron framework of the fixed State, the German has not only
liberty but anarchy. Anything can be said although, or rather because,
nothing can be done. Philosophy is really free. But this practically
means only that the prisoner's cell has become the madman's cell: that
it is scrawled all over inside with stars and systems, so that it looks
like eternity. This is the contradiction remarked by Dr. Sarolea, in his
brilliant book, between the wildness of German theory and the tameness
of German practice. The Germans _sterilise_ thought, making it active
with a wild virginity; which can bear no fruit.

But though there are so many mad theories, most of them have one root;
and depend upon one assumption. It matters little whether we call it,
with the German Socialists, "the Materialist Theory of History"; or,
with Bismarck, "blood and iron." It can be put most fairly thus: that
all _important_ events of history are biological, like a change of
pasture or the communism of a pack of wolves. Professors are still
tearing their hair in the effort to prove somehow that the Crusaders
were migrating for food like swallows; or that the French Revolutionists
were somehow only swarming like bees. This works in two ways often
accounted opposite; and explains both the German Socialist and the
Junker. For, first, it fits in with Teutonic Imperialism; making the
"blonde beasts" of Germania into lions whose nature it is to eat such
lambs as the French. The highest success of this notion in Europe is
marked by praise given to a race famous for its physical firmness and
fighting breed, but which has frankly pillaged and scarcely pretended
to rule; the Turk, whom some Tories cal