reached this ever since the advent of Bismarckism and the new Europe
that was formed forty years ago. Not a few of us have foretold not only
the tremendous attack on the British Empire designed by German sea power
but the precise steps of the war upon France, through Belgium, and to be
executed by an overwhelming force of sudden shock in the midst of peace.
For my part, nothing in this war since July 30 has at all surprised me,
unless it be the foul cruelty with which Belgian civilians have been
treated. Indeed, in January, 1913, I wrote a warning which reads now
like a summary of events that have since happened. I was denounced as a
senile alarmist by some who are now the loudest in calling to arms.
Alas! too late is their repentance.

May I ask why our eminent academicians and scholars who still profess
"friendship and admiration" for their German confreres never even
suspected the huge conspiracy of which civilization has been the victim?
Why did they accept the stars and crosses of Caligula-Attila? Why
hob-nob with the docile creatures of his chancery, and spread at home
and abroad the worship of Geist and Kultur? Are they fit to instruct us
about politics, public law, and international relations, when they were
so egregiously mistaken, so blind, so befooled, with regard to the most
portentous catastrophe in the memory of living men? I am glad that they
see their blindness now--but why this sentimental friendliness for those
who hoodwinked them?

Surely this should open their eyes to the mountains of pretentious
clouds on which the claims of Kultur rest. I am myself a student of
German learning, and quite aware of the enormous industry, subtlety, and
ingenuity of German scholarship. We owe deep gratitude to the older race
of the Savignys, Rankes, Mommsens. Since 1851 I have been five times in
Germany on different occasions down to 1900. I read and speak the
language, and twice I lived in Germany for months together, even in the
house of a distinguished man of science. I study their theology, their
sociology, economics, history, and their classics. I am quite aware of
the supremacy of German scholars in ancient literature, in many branches
of science, in the record of the past in art, manners, and civilization.
But to have edited a Greek play or to have discovered a new explosive, a
new comet, another microbe, does not qualify a savant to dogmatize on
international morals and the hegemony of the world. Sixty years ag