er tried to read its sacred and fearful hieroglyphics
that the day of a new, a formidable and inexorable event was at hand.

The theories built up on this point in the last sixty years by the
German professors, notably by Giesbrecht, the historian of the Ottos
and the Hohenstaufens, and Treitschke, the historian of the
Hohenzollerns, do not necessarily carry conviction but are at least
impressive; and the work of these two writers, which we do not know
as well as we should, and of Treitschke in particular possessed in
Germany an influence that sank deep into every mind, far exceeding
that of Nietzsche, which we looked upon as preponderant.

But let us ignore for the moment all that belongs to a remote past,
the study of which would call for more space than we have at our
disposal. Let us not question the empire of the Ottos, the
Hohenstaufens or the Hapsburgs, in which Germany, at least as a nation
and a race, played but a secondary part and was still unconscious of
her existence. Let us rather see what is happening nearer to us and,
so to speak, before our very eyes.

2

A hundred years ago, under Napoleon, France enjoyed her spell of
hegemony, which she was not able to prolong because this hegemony was
more the work of a prodigious but accidental genius than the fruit of
a real and intrinsic power. Next came the turn of England, who to-day
possesses the greatest empire that the world has seen since the days
of ancient Rome, that is to say, more than a fifth part of the
habitable globe. But this vast empire rests no more than did
Napoleon's upon an incontestible force, inasmuch as up to this day it
was defended only by an army less numerous and less well-equipped than
that of many a smaller nation, thus almost inevitably inviting war, as
Professor Cramb pointed out a year or two ago in his prophetic book,
_Germany and England_, which has only recently aroused the interest
which it deserves.

It seemed, therefore, as if between these two Powers, which were more
illusory than real, pending the advent of Russia, whose hour had not
yet struck; in this gap in history, between a nation on the verge of
its decline, or at least seemingly incapable of defending itself, and
a nation that was still too young and incapable of attack, fate
offered a magnificent place to whoso cared to take it. This is what
Germany felt, at first instinctively, urged by all the ill-defined
forces that impel mankind, and subsequently, in thes