led "the gentleman of Europe."
The Kaiser paused to adore the Crescent on his way to patronise the
Cross. It was corporately embodied when Greece attempted a solitary
adventure against Turkey and was quickly crushed. That English guns
helped to impose the mainly Germanic policy of the Concert upon Crete,
cannot be left out of mind while we are making appeals to Greece--or
considering the crimes of England.

But the same principle serves to keep the internal politics of the
Germans quiet, and prevent Socialism being the practical hope or peril
it has been in so many other countries. It operates in two ways; first,
by a curious fallacy about "the time not being ripe"--as if _time_ could
ever be ripe. The same savage superstition from the forests had infected
Matthew Arnold pretty badly when he made a personality out of the
Zeitgeist--perhaps the only ghost that was ever entirely fabulous. It is
tricked by a biological parallel, by which the chicken always comes out
of the egg "at the right time." He does not; he comes out when he comes
out. The Marxian Socialist will not strike till the clock strikes; and
the clock is made in Germany, and never strikes. Moreover, the theory of
all history as a search for food makes the masses content with having
food and physic, but not freedom. The best working model in the matter
is the system of Compulsory Insurance; which was a total failure and
dead letter in France but has been, in the German sense, a great success
in Germany. It treats employed persons as a fixed, separate, and lower
caste, who must not themselves dispose of the margin of their small
wages. In 1911 it was introduced into England by Mr. Lloyd George, who
had studied its operations in Germany, and, by the Prussian prestige in
"social reform," was passed.

These three tendencies cohere, or are cohering, in an institution which
is not without a great historical basis and not without great modern
conveniences. And as France was the standard-bearer of citizenship in
1798, Germany is the standard-bearer of this alternative solution in
1915. The institution which our fathers called Slavery fits in with, or
rather logically flows from, all the three spirits of which I have
spoken, and promises great advantages to each of them. It can give the
individual worker everything except the power to alter the State--that
is, his own status. Finality (or what certain eleutheromaniacs would
call hopelessness) of status is the soul of