en the
nobodies and the somebodies are found to echo and re-echo each other,
the inference is that the general tone of the public mind is very
fairly represented. It will be noted that many of the wildest shrieks
of self-glorification and ferocity proceed from clerics and
theologians.

The world as a whole has been curiously blind to the inordinate
self-valuation characteristic of the German spirit. So long ago as the
beginning of last century, we find Fichte assuring his countrymen
that: "There are no two ways about it: if you founder, the whole of
humanity founders with you, without hope of any possible restoration."
Even Heine, in the preface to "Deutschland" (1844) could write
half-jestingly that "if only the Germans would out-soar the French in
deeds, as they already had in thought," and if they would carry out in
their spiritual and political life some rather vaguely indicated
reforms, "not only Alsace and Lorraine, but all France, all Europe,
the whole world, would become German." "I often dream," he adds, "of
this mission, this universal dominance of Germany." Of course we are
not to write Heine down a Pan-German of the modern, realistic type.
There is more than a dash of irony in this passage--he obviously
implies that there is very little chance of Germany fulfilling the
conditions that he lays down as indispensable to her world-domination.
Nevertheless, there is a sinister significance in the fact that a
spirit like his should be found dallying for a moment with dreams of
world-supremacy. It was, of course, the war of 1870, with its
resounding triumphs, that brought these visions, so to speak, within
the range of practical politics. For fifteen or twenty years, Germany
was, as Bismarck said, "sated"; but with the coming of the youthful,
pushful, self-assertive Kaiser, her aggressive instincts re-awakened
and she fell to brooding over the idea that her incomparable physical
and spiritual energies were cabin'd, cribb'd, confined. The rapid
growth of her population reinforced this idea, and the increase of her
wealth, as was natural, only made her greedy for more. The result was
that she gave her soul over in fatal earnest to an ambitious and
grasping tribalism to which she was, from of old, only too prone. The
Pan-Germans were the Uhlans, the stormy petrels, of the movement; but
the whole mind of the nation was in reality carried away by it, save
for a very small section which was conscious of its dangers and