ay hate abroad and with some
unanimity. But after the war, with no war going on or any prospect of a
fresh war, with every exploiter and every industrial tyrant who has made
his unobtrusive profits while the country scowled and spat at England,
stripped of the cover of that excitement, then it is inevitable that
much of this noble hate of England will be seen for the cant it is. The
cultivated hate of the war phase, reinforced by the fresh hate born of
confusion and misery, will swing loose, as it were, seeking dispersedly
for objects. The petty, incessant irritations of proximity will count
for more; the national idea for less. The Hohenzollerns and the Junkers
will have to be very nimble indeed if the German accomplishment of hate
does not swing round upon them.

It is a common hypothesis with those who speculate on the probable
effects of these disillusionments that Germany may break up again into
its component parts. It is pointed out that Germany is, so to speak, a
palimpsest, that the broad design of the great black eagle and the
imperial crown are but newly painted over a great number of
particularisms, and that these particularisms may return. The empire of
the Germans may break up again. That I do not believe. The forces that
unified Germany lie deeper than the Hohenzollern adventure; print, paper
and the spoken word have bound Germany now into one people for all time.
None the less those previous crowns and symbols that still show through
the paint of the new design may help greatly, as that weakens under the
coming stresses, to disillusion men about its necessity. There was, they
will be reminded, a Germany before Prussia, before Austria for the
matter of that. The empire has been little more than the first German
experiment in unity. It is a new-fangled thing that came and may go
again--leaving Germany still a nation, still with the sense of a common
Fatherland.

Let us consider a little more particularly the nature of the mass of
population whose collective action in the years immediately ahead of us
we are now attempting to forecast. Its social strata are only very
inexactly equivalent to those in the countries of the Pledged Allies.
First there are the masses of the people. In England for purposes of
edification we keep up the legend of the extreme efficiency of Germany,
the high level of German education, and so forth. The truth is that the
average _elementary_ education of the common people in Britain