e of a different commonsense outlook. Where an
institutional difference of this kind is somewhat large and consistent,
so as to amount in effect to a discrepancy, as may fairly be said of the
difference between Imperial Germany and its like on the one hand, and
the English-speaking nations on the other hand, there the difference in
everyday conceptions may readily make the two peoples mutually
unintelligible to one another, on those points of institutional
principle that are involved in the discrepancy. This is the state of the
case as between the German people, including the Intellectuals, and the
peoples against whom their preconceptions of national destiny have
arrayed them. And the many vivid expressions of consternation,
abhorrence and incredulity that have come out of this community of
Intellectuals in the course of the past two years of trial and error,
bear sufficient testimony to the rigorous constraint which these German
preconceptions and their logic exercise over the Intellectuals, no less
than over the populace.

Conversely, of course, it is nearly as impracticable for those who have
grown up under the discipline of democratic institutions to comprehend
the habitual outlook of the commonplace German patriot on national
interests and aims; not quite, perhaps, because the discipline of use
and wont and indoctrination is neither so rigorous nor so consistent in
their case. But there is, after all, prevalent among them a sufficiently
evident logical inability to understand and appreciate the paramount
need of national, that is to say dynastic, ascendancy that actuates all
German patriots; just as these same patriots are similarly unable to
consider national interests in any other light than that of dynastic
ascendancy.

Going simply on the face value of the available evidence, any outsider
might easily fall into the error of believing that when the great
adventure of the war opened up before them, as well as when presently
the shock of baffled endeavour brought home its exasperating futility,
the Intellectuals of the Fatherland distinguished themselves above all
other classes and conditions of men in the exuberance of their patriotic
abandon. Such a view would doubtless be almost wholly erroneous. It is
not that the Intellectuals reached a substantially superior pitch of
exaltation, but only that, being trained in the use of language, they
were able to express their emotions with great facility. There seems no