ind
of heavy humour. That German voice one may not like, but one must needs
respect it. It is, at any rate, not bombastic. It is essentially honest.
When the imperial eagle comes home with half its feathers out like a
crow that has met a bear; when the surviving aristocratic officers
reappear with a vastly diminished swagger in the biergartens, I believe
that the hitherto acquiescent middle classes and skilled artisan class
of German will entirely disappoint those people who expect them to
behave either with servility or sentimental loyalty. The great
revolutionary impulse of the French was passionate and generous. The
revolutionary impulse of Germany may be even more deadly; it may be
contemptuous. It may be they will not even drag emperor and nobles down;
they will shove them aside....

In all these matters one must ask the reader to enlarge his perspectives
at least as far back as the last three centuries. The galaxy of German
monarchies that has over-spread so much of Europe is a growth of hardly
more than two centuries. It is a phase in the long process of the
break-up of the Roman Empire and of the catholic system that inherited
its tradition. These royalties have formed a class apart, breeding only
among themselves, and attempting to preserve a sort of caste
internationalism in the face of an advance in human intelligence, a
spread of printing, reading, and writing that makes inevitably for the
recrudescence of national and race feeling, and the increasing
participation of the people in government.

In Russia and England these originally German dynasties are meeting the
problems of the new time by becoming national. They modify themselves
from year to year. The time when Britain will again have a Queen of
British race may not be very remote. The days when the affairs of Europe
could be discussed at Windsor in German and from a German standpoint
ended with the death of Queen Victoria, and it is only in such
improvised courts as those of Greece and Bulgaria that the national
outlook can still be contemplated from a foreign standpoint and
discussed in a foreign tongue. The age when the monarchical system made
the courts of three-quarters of Europe a German's Fatherland has ended
for ever. And with that, the last rational advantage of monarchy and
royalist sentimentality disappears from the middle-class German's point
of view.

So it seems to me that the following conclusions about the future of
Germany emerge fr