cle in a perfection that may well make Germany
despair of ever surpassing us in that line. Sir Edward Grey is a Junker
from his topmost hair to the tips of his toes; and Sir Edward is a
charming man, incapable of cutting down even an Opposition front
bencher, or of telling a German he intends to have him shot. Lord Cromer
is a Junker. Mr. Winston Churchill is an odd and not disagreeable
compound of Junker and Yankee: his frank anti-German pugnacity is
enormously more popular than the moral babble (Milton's phrase) of his
sanctimonious colleagues. He is a bumptious and jolly Junker, just as
Lord Curzon is an uppish Junker. I need not string out the list. In
these islands the Junker is literally all over the shop.

It is very difficult for anyone who is not either a Junker or a
successful barrister to get into an English Cabinet, no matter which
party is in power, or to avoid resigning when we strike up the drum. The
Foreign Office is a Junker Club. Our governing classes are
overwhelmingly Junker: all who are not Junkers are riff-raff whose only
claim to their position is the possession of ability of some sort:
mostly ability to make money. And, of course, the Kaiser is a Junker,
though less true-blue than the Crown Prince, and much less autocratic
than Sir Edward Grey, who, without consulting us, sends us to war by a
word to an ambassador and pledges all our wealth to his foreign allies
by a stroke of his pen.

*What Is a Militarist?*

Now that we know what a Junker is, let us have a look at the
Militarists. A Militarist is a person who believes that all real power
is the power to kill, and that Providence is on the side of the big
battalions. The most famous Militarist at present, thanks to the zeal
with which we have bought and quoted his book, is General Friedrich von
Bernhardi. But we cannot allow the General to take precedence of our own
writers as a Militarist propagandist. I am old enough to remember the
beginning of the anti-German phase of that very ancient propaganda in
England. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 left Europe very much
taken aback. Up to that date nobody was afraid of Prussia, though
everybody was a little afraid of France; and we were keeping "buffer
States" between ourselves and Russia in the east. Germany had indeed
beaten Denmark; but then Denmark was a little State, and was abandoned
in her hour of need by those who should have helped her, to the great
indignation of Ibsen. Germany h