Europe.

The Intellectuals have spoken with conviction and sincerity of the
spiritual state of the German people, but in so doing, and in so far as
bears on the character of German nationalism, they have been in closer
contact, intellectually and sympathetically, with the intellectual and
spiritual life of civilised Europe at large than with the movements of
the spirit among the German populace. And their canvassing of the
concepts which so have come under their attention from over the national
frontiers has been carried forward--so far, again, as bears on the
questions that are here in point--with the German-dynastic principles,
logic and mechanism of execution under their immediate observation and
supplying the concrete materials for inquiry. Indeed, it holds true, by
and large, that nothing else than this German-dynastic complement of
ways and means has, or can effectually, come under their observation in
such a degree of intimacy as to give body and definition to the somewhat
abstract theorems on cultural aims and national preconceptions that have
come to them from outside. In short, they have borrowed these
theoretical formulations from abroad, without the concrete apparatus of
ways and means in which these theorems are embodied in their foreign
habitat, and have so found themselves construing these theoretical
borrowings in the only concrete terms of which they have had first-hand
and convincing knowledge. Such an outcome would be fairly unavoidable,
inasmuch as these Intellectuals, however much they are, in the spirit,
citizens of the cosmopolitan republic of knowledge and intelligence,
they are after all, _in propria persona_, immediately and unremittingly
subjects of the German-dynastic State; so that all their detail thinking
on the aims, ways and means of life, in all its civil and political
bearings, is unavoidably shaped by the unremitting discipline of their
workday experience under this dynastic scheme. The outcome has been that
while they have taken up, as they have understood them, the concepts
that rule the civic life of these other, maturer nations, they have
apprehended and developed these theorems of civic life in the terms and
by the logic enforced in that system of control and surveillance known
to them by workday experience,--the only empirical terms at hand.

The apex of growth and the center of diffusion as regards the modern
culture in respect of the ideals and logic of civic life--other phas