behind this half-hearted boast.

Werther, and Faust, and Lohengrin, are far more real than those
scarecrows autocracy, bureaucracy, and militarism, triplets of straw,
premature births, not destined to live, of which Germany boasts to-day
as the most precocious children in the world. They are just that,
precocious children, teaching the pallid religion of dependence upon
the state and enforcing the anarchical morality of man's despair of
himself. Our descendants will have Werther and Faust and Lohengrin, as
the companions of their dreams at least, when that autocracy shall
have been blown to the winds, when that bureaucracy shall have dried
up and wasted away, when that exaggerated militarism shall be but
bleaching bones and dust.

Who has not lived in Germany as a house of dreams, seen the Valkyrie
race by, heard the swan song, wept with Werther and with Marguerite,
smiled cynically with Mephistopheles, languished with the Palm Tree
and the Pine of Heine; who has not sat at the feet of Germany as a
philosopher, and traced the very fissures of his own brain in
following thinking into thought; but who in all the world longs for
this new Germany of the barracks, the corporal and the pedler?
Germania as a malicious vestal clad in horrid armor and making
mischief in the world is a very present danger; Germania with a torch
lighting the world to salvation is a phantom, a ghost, seen by hasty
and nervous observers, who rush out to proclaim an adventure that may
excite a passing interest in themselves. Her methods to-day are
solution by suffocation; no wonder those of us who loved her in our
youth see in her a ghost to-day. I am thankful that I was her pupil
when she had other things to teach, when she wore other robes, when
she was modest, and not snatching at the trident of Neptune, nor
clutching at the casque of Mars.

"Wir wissen zu viel, wir wollen zu wenig," became the national
complaint, and Germany has attempted to transform herself. She has
succeeded in the transformation, but the transformation is not a
success. Even that learned English friend of Germany, Lord Haldane,
does not see, or will not see, that a people thinking themselves into
action, instead of developing into action naturally, through action,
must suffer from the artificiality of the process. Lord Haldane
applauds their thought-out organization in industrial, commercial, and
military matters, but he fails to mention the squandering of
individual cap