is no spot in the world where
the Germans govern another race and are not hated. They know this, and
are disquieted; they meet with coldness on all hands, and their remedy
for the coldness is self-assertion and brag. The Russian statesman was
right who remarked that modern Germany has been too early admitted into
the comity of European nations. Her behaviour, in her new international
relations, is like the behaviour of an uneasy, jealous upstart in an
old-fashioned quiet drawing-room. She has no genius for equality; her
manners are a compound of threatening and flattery. When she wishes to
assert herself, she bullies; when she wishes to endear herself, she
crawls; and the one device is no more successful than the other.

Might is Right; but the sort of might which enables one nation to govern
another in time of peace is very unlike the armoured thrust of the
war-engine. It is a power compounded of sympathy and justice. The
English (it is admitted by many foreign critics) have studied justice
and desired justice. They have inquired into and protected rights that
were unfamiliar, and even grotesque, to their own ideas, because they
believed them to be rights. In the matter of sympathy their reputation
does not stand so high; they are chill in manner, and dislike all
effusive demonstrations of feeling. Yet those who come to know them know
that they are not unimaginative; they have a genius for equality; and
they do try to put themselves in the other fellow's place, to see how
the position looks from that side. What has happened in India may
perhaps be taken to prove, among many other things, that the inhabitants
of India begin to know that England has done her best, and does feel a
disinterested solicitude for the peoples under her charge. She has long
been a mother of nations, and is not frightened by the problems of
adolescence.

The Germans have as yet shown no sign of skill in governing other
peoples. Might is Right; and it is quite conceivable that they may
acquire colonies by violence. If they want to keep them they will have
to shut their own professors' books, and study the intimate history of
the British Empire. We are old hands at the business; we have lost more
colonies than ever they owned, and we begin to think that we have learnt
the secret of success. At any rate, our experience has done much for us,
and has helped us to avoid failure. Yet the German colonial party stare
at us with bovine malevolence. In al