more a good European, is one of extraordinary
interest to every civilised man. In other words, what are the prospects
of a fairly fundamental revolution in German life and thought and
affairs in the years immediately before us?

Sec.2

In a sense every European country must undergo revolutionary changes as
a consequence of the enormous economic exhaustion and social
dislocations of this war. But what I propose to discuss here is the
possibility of a real political revolution, in the narrower sense of
the word, in Germany, a revolution that will end the Hohenzollern
system, the German dynastic system, altogether, that will democratise
Prussia and put an end for ever to that secretive scheming of military
aggressions which is the essential quarrel of Europe with Germany. It is
the most momentous possibility of our times, because it opens the way to
an alternative state of affairs that may supersede the armed watching
and systematic war of tariffs, prohibitions, and exclusions against the
Central Empires that must quite unavoidably be the future attitude of
the Pledged Allies to any survival of the Hohenzollern empire.

We have to bear in mind that in this discussion we are dealing with
something very new and quite untried hitherto by anything but success,
that new Germany whose unification began with the spoliation of Denmark
and was completed at Versailles. It is not a man's lifetime old. Under
the state socialism and aggressive militarism of the Hohenzollern regime
it had been led to a level of unexampled pride and prosperity, and it
plunged shouting and singing into this war, confident of victories. It
is still being fed with dwindling hopes of victory, no longer unstinted
hopes, but still hopes--by a sort of political bread-card system. The
hopes outlast the bread-and-butter, but they dwindle and dwindle. How is
this parvenu people going to stand the cessation of hope, the
realisation of the failure and fruitlessness of such efforts as no
people on earth have ever made before? How are they going to behave when
they realise fully that they have suffered and died and starved and
wasted all their land in vain? When they learn too that the cause of the
war was a trick, and the Russian invasion a lie? They have a large
democratic Press that will not hesitate to tell them that, that does
already to the best of its ability disillusion them. They are a
carefully trained and educated and disciplined people, it is true[4];