gling with the Augustenburg claim, the forgery
of the Ems telegram, were either successfully concealed or were but
cloudily appreciated. The Higher Criticism had entered into our ethics
as well as our theology. Our view of Europe was also distorted and made
disproportionate by the accident of a natural concern for Constantinople
and our route to India, which led Palmerston and later Premiers to
support the Turk and see Russia as the only enemy. This somewhat cynical
reaction was summed up in the strange figure of Disraeli, who made a
pro-Turkish settlement full of his native indifference to the Christian
subjects of Turkey, and sealed it at Berlin in the presence of Bismarck.
Disraeli was not without insight into the inconsistencies and illusions
of the English; he said many sagacious things about them, and one
especially when he told the Manchester School that their motto was
"Peace and Plenty, amid a starving people, and with the world in arms."
But what he said about Peace and Plenty might well be parodied as a
comment on what he himself said about Peace with Honour. Returning from
that Berlin Conference he should have said, "I bring you Peace with
Honour; peace with the seeds of the most horrible war of history; and
honour as the dupes and victims of the old bully in Berlin."

But it was, as we have seen, especially in social reform that Germany
was believed to be leading the way, and to have found the secret of
dealing with the economic evil. In the case of Insurance, which was the
test case, she was applauded for obliging all her workmen to set apart a
portion of their wages for any time of sickness; and numerous other
provisions, both in Germany and England, pursued the same ideal, which
was that of protecting the poor against themselves. It everywhere
involved an external power having a finger in the family pie; but little
attention was paid to any friction thus caused, for all prejudices
against the process were supposed to be the growth of ignorance. And
that ignorance was already being attacked by what was called
education--an enterprise also inspired largely by the example, and
partly by the commercial competition of Germany. It was pointed out that
in Germany governments and great employers thought it well worth their
while to apply the grandest scale of organization and the minutest
inquisition of detail to the instruction of the whole German race. The
government was the stronger for training its scholars a