all,
the aim of all the great kingdoms has been to increase and strengthen
the population, and differences of nationality have been treated as but
trifling obstacles in the way. If the principle of free nationality
which is now stirring the world and inspiring a war of liberation is to
triumph, then the liberty won must include the individuals who prefer a
chosen to a compulsory political allegiance.

Sometimes the forces of attraction and repulsion create strong ties of
sympathy or lead to acts of repudiation which cross frontiers
irrespectively of the indications on the barometer of foreign politics.
A man may find his spiritual home in the most unexpected place. He may
irresistibly be drawn by the currents of philosophy and art to a foreign
country. The customs in his own may drive him to bitter denunciation.
No one has said harder things of Germany than Nietzsche. Schopenhauer
wished it to be known that he despised the German nation on account of
its infinite stupidity, and that he blushed to belong to it. Heine fled
from Germany in intellectual despair. "If I were a German," he wrote,
"and I am no German...." His heart was captured by the French. Goethe
and Frederick the Great were both profoundly influenced by the French
spirit. Voltaire was most useful at the Prussian Court, for he corrected
the voluminous literary and political output which his Prussian majesty
penned--in French. But there was something more than mere utility in the
tie between the philosopher and the monarch. Frederick was not only
trying to handle heavy German artillery with light French esprit; his
mind craved for the spices of Gallic wit, his thought was ever striving
to clothe itself in the form of France. Another "great" German,
Catherine II of Russia, also moved within the orbit of the French
philosophers.

Admiration of Germany and German ways has found the strongest expression
in foreigners, and the megalomania from which her sons suffer to-day
may be traced to such outbursts of adulation. Carlyle, the most
representative of pro-German men of letters in the Victorian era, wrote
in 1870:

Alone of nations, Prussia seems still to understand something
of the art of governing, and of fighting enemies to said art.
Germany from of old, has been the peaceablest, most pious, and in
the end most valiant and terriblest of nations. Germany ought to
be the President of Europe, and will again, it seems, be tried
with tha