ocracy. It is the newest form of human association, and we are
still but half awake to its needs and necessary conditions. For it
is idle to pretend that the little city democracies of ancient times
were comparable to the great essays in practical republicanism that
mankind is making to-day. This age of the democratic republics that
dawn is a new age. It has not yet lasted for a century, not for a
paltry hundred years.... All new things are weak things; a rat can
kill a man-child with ease; the greater the destiny, the weaker the
immediate self-protection may be. And to me it seems that your
complete and perfect imperialism, ruled by Germans for Germans, is
in its scope and outlook a more antiquated and smaller and less
noble thing than these sprawling emergent giant democracies of the
West that struggle so confusedly against it...._

_But that we do struggle confusedly, with pitiful leaders and
infinite waste and endless delay; that it is to our indisciplines
and to the dishonesties and tricks our incompleteness provokes, that
the prolongation of this war is to be ascribed, I readily admit. At
the outbreak of this war I had hoped to see militarism felled within
a year...._

Section 6

From this point onward Mr. Britling's notes became more fragmentary.
They had a consecutiveness, but they were discontinuous. His thought had
leapt across gaps that his pen had had no time to fill. And he had
begun to realise that his letter to the old people in Pomerania was
becoming impossible. It had broken away into dissertation.

"Yet there must be dissertations," he said. "Unless such men as we are
take these things in hand, always we shall be misgoverned, always the
sons will die...."

Section 7

_I do not think you Germans realise how steadily you were conquering
the world before this war began. Had you given half the energy and
intelligence you have spent upon this war to the peaceful conquest
of men's minds and spirits, I believe that you would have taken the
leadership of the world tranquilly--no man disputing. Your science
was five years, your social and economic organisation was a quarter
of a century in front of ours.... Never has it so lain in the power
of a great people to lead and direct mankind towards the world
republic and universal peace. It needed but a certain generosity of
the imagination...._