The Changing Mind of a Nation at War

I

THAT the process of discovering the British Empire is still in its early stages would be an obviously absurd statement if it were to appear in a treatise on geography. But if the statement were made with reference to our national psychology there would be good reasons for accepting it as true. The British public as a whole, or, let us say, the millions who go to the polling booths, have had no clear vision of what the British Empire is, no thorough grasp of what it means, and no deep sense of responsibility for its good government. I am far from suggesting total ignorance or complete indifference. Broadly speaking, we all know something about the Empire, and some, fortunately, know a great deal. The general public knows enough about the Empire to be proud of its existence; that is to say, they know it to be world-wide, rich, and powerful; they know that its creation has cost generations of effort and sacrifice. And yet it must be confessed that the general level of knowledge has been inadequate to the issues involved, and the interest taken in imperial affairs disproportionately small in comparison with their human importance.

This will be seen on comparing the place occupied in our normal political life by imperial and insular questions respectively. Nine questions out of ten have referred predominantly, if not exclusively, to purely insular interests. The voter has gone to the poll as a citizen of the British Islands, charged with political responsibility in respect of the forty millions by whom they are inhabited. Only incidentally has he remembered that he is a citizen of the British Empire, or asked himself what may be the effect of the vote he is giving on the interests of the four hundred and fifty millions of his fellow subjects. And even if reminded of his larger citizenship, as he was when tariff reform became prominent, he has always found it difficult to retain the imperial point of view, and has tended to argue the question out as if it affected solely the populous cities of Great Britain. There has been a limit to the political ranges of his mind — the four seas that wash the British coasts. He has known — or perhaps one should say, we have known — that the Empire belongs to us; but some missionary work has been needed before our minds could grasp the truth that we belong to the Empire. We belong to England — or to Great Britain — that is a familiar thought; but the wider perspective has been strange to us; we have been conscious of an effort of thought before we could realize the ambit of our citizenship,— the idea not coming to us instinctively or inevitably, but needing a reminder which, as I have said, is apt to be forgotten. To most of us our imperial responsibilities have presented themselves — when we thought of them at all — as a kind of appendix to our strictly British obligations; they might be removed altogether without making much difference to our interest in domestic controversies; the question of Home Rule, or National Insurance, or Strike Legislation, would stand just where it is, and be equally worthy of all we can give to it in the way of political interest, if the Empire in its larger sense did not exist. All such questions, we have tended to think, might be taken out of their imperial context, with little loss of importance and with little change of meaning.

Such, up to the present moment, seems to me to have been our prevalent national psychology in this matter. It has fallen far short of the point where consciousness instantly reveals the Briton to himself as the citizen of a worldwide city, a member of an organized community of four hundred and fifty million souls. Nobody, so far as I am aware, has ever invented a name which characterizes the Briton in his consciousness of this larger relationship. ‘ Imperialist ’ means only that he holds certain views. What is needed is a name which shall indicate an attitude to the Empire in the same way that ‘Englishman’ indicates an attitude to England. To say that So-and-so is an Englishman implies among other things that he bears England in his heart, gives England a first place in his thought, and is ready, if need arise, to lay down his life in her cause. What word have we to characterize the man of whom all this might be said, with the Empire substituted for England? We have none. And the word is lacking because the type of man whom it would describe has been rare among us; or, speaking more strictly, because our minds have not yet formed the idea which would render such a word an imperative necessity of language. Should the time ever come when our national consciousness — whose proper birthday, I believe, was somewhere in the reign of Queen Elizabeth — shall expand into an imperial consciousness, we shall then find ourselves amply provided with an imperial vocabulary, and these tiresome paraphrases will no longer be necessary. As things now are, the very poverty of our language bears witness that we have never ‘realized’ the Empire we possess and govern; never familiarized our thought with the essential truth that each one of us is a component member of a world-wide state. Psychologically the British Empire has remained undiscovered by the British public.

The British Empire, in its present extent and organization, is a comparatively recent phenomenon. In size, in wealth, in the civilization of its component parts and their close relations with one another, its characteristics are so different from what they were a century ago that we can draw no parallel with the Napoleonic era. But now for the first time in its history the British Empire, in the modern meaning of the term, is being attacked — and attacked with unexampled vehemence and resolution. It is a new experience, and like all new experiences it is compelling a readjustment of thought.

This is a war of the Empire, by the Empire, for the Empire. The Colonies are fighting for us and we are fighting for the Colonies. Our fellow subjects in India are represented in Flanders by a great army of the finest warriors in the world, who have helped to check the would-be invaders of our shores. Gurkhas, Sikhs, and Pathans have shed their blood that London might be safe. Mohammedan, Hindu, and Christian have fallen side by side in defense of the liberties of our race. This, I say, is a new thing in our history. We begin to feel a deepened intimacy with the dominions overseas; the feeling is reflected in the daily press, in the utterances of the platform and the pulpit, in the conversations of philosophers and of working men. The Germans predicted that the outbreak of war would split the Empire into fragments. It has given the Empire a spiritual solidarity such as it never before possessed. It has made us a greater nation, not in the sense that it has added to our dominions, but in the deeper sense that it has caused our political consciousness to embrace more completely the significance of that which was already ours. Under the stress of war the political organization of the Empire is being enriched by a more highly developed psychological and moral organization; it is acquiring a corporate mind, just as the mother country after the defeat of the Spanish Armada awoke to a new consciousness of her national individuality and began to know herself for what she was.

The parallel is profoundly interesting. It took the English people many centuries to discover their own country. The average Englishman in the reign of Henry VIII had a vaguer notion of England than we have of Canada (probably he had never seen a map of England); of Scotland than we have of Ceylon; of Ireland than we have of Central Africa. But just as his vague conceptions gave place in course of time to vision and realization, so now we British are beginning to think of the Empire as something more than a confused extension of our national boundaries, or as a group of appendages to our national home. The Empire is becoming our country, and we are becoming its citizens in heart as well as in name. Not that the change is already complete. But no close observer of present tendencies will doubt that the movement of the British mind is in the direction of which I speak. If the change continues, its ethical and spiritual consequences will be very great.

II

In connection with this extension of our national consciousness one may note at the present time some curious questionings among thoughtful men as to the bearing of democratic theory on our imperial obligations. We call ourselves a democracy; but there are moments, in the course of dealing even with domestic problems, when we find it hard to reconcile the facts with the theory. And the difficulty becomes greater just in proportion as we extend our thoughts to the imperial scale. According to the democratic theory the people are to be consulted as to all that concerns their interests. Well, there is nothing that concerns our interests quite so deeply as the existence of the Empire. But when have the people been consulted in the matter? Proud as the British may be of possessing an empire on which the sun never sets, it is certain that the people as a whole have never been asked whether they wished to possess just such an empire as this. They have never been asked how large they wished the Empire to be; or whether they would be content with something less or greater. In an age when all things political are supposed to be determined by voting, it is a curious circumstance that this, the greatest of political questions, has never been voted on at all.

Nay, more. So far as I know, the British people have never said to themselves, as the spokesmen of Germany have recently been saying, ‘Go to now; world-dominion shall be ours.’ It would tax the historian to fix the period when the design for a world-wide empire became a definite ambition of the British people. True, there have been statesmen like the late Lord Beaconsfield, or Lord Chatham in an earlier age, who made vast plans for increasing the dominions of the Crown. But the popular will did not originate these designs, much as it may have applauded them when carried out — although even this has not always been the case. And the control exercised even by statesmen over the process of imperial expansion has been of a distinctly piecemeal character. As one annexation followed another, none of our ministers has foreseen where the process would end. None of them has had a vision in advance of the Empire as it exists to-day — in extent, in population, and in wealth. As Seeley long ago pointed out, the Empire has largely come into being by inadvertence. Indeed it would be extremely hard to fix responsibility for its existence, in its present character, on any group or series of statesmen, or on any particular generation of Englishmen — to say nothing of particular individuals. A province here, a frontier there, an island somewhere else might be correctly set down to an assignable wave of public opinion or to the clever diplomacy of some well-known minister. But the total growth seems to have escaped from human control altogether. Certainly nothing would be more untrue than to treat the existence of the Empire as though it exactly corresponded to the expressed will of the living generation. They have not willed it into being. They found it there, — like so many of the financial obligations, such as the National Debt, which have been inherited from the past, and have to be accepted whether we like them or not, notwithstanding the maxim which is said to be the corner-stone of the constitution: ‘No taxation without representation.'

Here then is a broad and vital fact — the fact of the Empire — embracing the whole compass of our democratic life, in regard to which it is not only plain that the people are not masters, but extremely difficult to say who the ‘masters’ are or have been. Now that we are beginning to realize the Empire as we have never done before, this fact is attracting attention and raising questions which affect our whole conception of democracy, in its relation to domestic as well as to imperial concerns. So great an instance of discrepancy between the actual circumstances of the national life and the range over which democratic control remains effective is not likely to be solitary; and the consequence of reflecting on these things is that not a few among us are inclined to revise our democratic faith, — not as to the main principle, perhaps, but at all events as to the range of its application.

We are learning in this connection to understand more clearly the influence of the past on the present. We begin to see that we inherit from the past, not ‘effete institutions only’ but the form and pressure of our national life, the range, significance, and general direction of our imperial duties. These in all their essential features have been determined for us by the action of forces which had done their work before we were born. Thus the democratic conception of the state as embodying the common will of its citizens is seen to be inadequate, unless we extend the common will in time so as to cover the operations of the past ages from which we inherit the Empire and its laws.

Unless I am much mistaken the mind of the country is moving at the moment in the direction of what I will venture to call a spiritual conservatism, which may or may not express itself hereafter in renewed support for official conservative parties. We are in no mood to respond to the lines of the well-known hymn which bid us ‘give the past unto the wind.' A past which has bequeathed to us our national status and the broad outline of our imperial responsibilities, cannot be given to the wind without a degree of treachery of which the fiercest anarchist in our midst is not capable. Without distinction we feel ourselves bound to ‘carry on’; and what we are ‘ carrying on’ is the work of our fathers from the most distant ages to the present day. Even the militant suffragette, who a few months back had declared war on society and vowed to reconstruct the world de novo, is now engaged with the rest of us in a great struggle for the maintenance of the historic state.

III

Another interesting change, of which many indications may be noted, is a tendency to revise our estimate of the degree of intelligence represented by modern civilization. For a long time past a kind of humanism has been current both in Europe and America which took the form of an enthusiastic faith in ‘the march of mind.’ Appearances seemed to warrant the belief that civilized man had become far more reasonable than his forefathers. Universal education, the spread of science, the reading habits of the public, the free discussion of all matters of human interest appeared to have put a vast distance, to be measured in terms of growing reasonableness, between the present enlightenment and the darkened intelligence of the barbaric age. In all discussion of public questions it had become natural to assume that communities composed of educated men and women would, when acting collectively, guide their courses with a fair measure of worldly wisdom; certainly an argument which assumed them capable of acting like children, fools, or barbarians would have seemed inapplicable to existing conditions.

Most of us moreover took for granted without qualification the maxim which declares, ‘There is wisdom in numbers.’ If the modern individual had grown wiser than his fathers, what a vast increase of wisdom must be represented by the modern state, which is so organized that millions of educated individuals may lay their heads together in consultation for the common good! These were some of our prepossessions, and their net result was a high estimate of the relative intelligence of the modern world.

To these prepossessions the war has brought a measure of disillusion. Our first impression when the war broke out was of the unimaginable wickedness of its authors — whoever they might be. To this impression must now be added another, which was slower in coming but is deepening with every day the war is prolonged. I mean the impression of the unimaginable stupidity of the whole proceeding. Since history began to record the deeds of men, has the world ever seen such an exhibition of limited intelligence as that afforded by the war? To be sure, a champion of the contrary might point to this or that in the conduct or strategy of the war which could be accomplished only by men whose wits had been trained to the uttermost. But what does all that amount to, as an exhibition of human wisdom, when we compare it with the dullness of heart and mind, the restriction of outlook, the subservience to empty sophisms (such as si vis pacem para bellum), the misconceived self-interest, the idiotic illusions, the want of imagination, the miscalculations, the pathetic blunderings which have characterized the course of events leading up to the war? All that education has won for the human mind seems dwarfed to insignificance by the elemental folly of this background. To what end has mind been ‘marching’ if at this advanced stage of its progress it has nothing better to show for itself than this ? Could anything be conceived better calculated to let civilization down in its intellectual self-esteem?

In offering these remarks I am reporting the gist of a conversation which took place not long ago between two Oxford men. One of them, speaking of the war, said something to the effect that it showed Christianity as ‘broken down.’ To this the other immediately answered, ‘But has not the philosophy of human progress broken down in the same sense? Has not reason broken down? Has not common sense broken down? Have not the principles of the great moralists — especially the German moralists — broken down? Where are the “three Universal Principles” now? Where is the Religion of Humanity? Where is Secularism? Where are Tom Paine and Voltaire and Comte and Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx and Bernard Shaw? What have these done singly or together to make impossible this stupendous act of folly?’

I am inclined to think, therefore, judging from the temper of the men with whom I am more immediately in contact, that we shall emerge from this war with chastened confidence in the ‘march of mind.’ We shall look abroad for other guaranties of human progress. Here in Oxford we believe, in common with Englishmen generally, that Germany is responsible for the war. And we have never doubted that Germany is the most highly ‘educated’ nation of the world — in the sense in which ‘ education’ is commonly understood. From this we are bound to infer that there is something wrong with the common understanding of ‘education.’ What other conclusion can be drawn if the premises are admitted, — that Germany is the most educated nation, and that in spite of her highly trained intelligence she has set on foot the most stupid series of actions in the history of mankind? ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’ We are willing for the moment to leave the distinctively moral issues, grave as these are, in abeyance. We see that blunders and illusions, no less than crimes, can inflict enormous woe upon the world. We see that the kind of training by which Europe has been cultivating its intelligence for centuries, even when carried to the high degree attained by Germany, is no protection against the most disastrous, and the most elementary, mistakes of national judgment.

IV

What, then, is the relation between the corporate intelligence of a state and the general level of intelligence attained by its individual members? This is another of the questions which has been forced upon the minds of many persons in this country by the extraordinary spectacle of corporate stupidity presented by the war.

The question is complicated at the outset by the enormous number of different meanings which may be given to the word intelligence. There is one kind possessed by the ‘simple’; and there is another kind possessed by the ‘wise’; and we know on the best authority that the former kind is often able to confound the latter. One man will be intelligent just because he is unsophisticated; another because his mind has been artificially drilled. My gardener, for instance, in spite of the fact that he left the village school at twelve years of age is, in respect of certain fundamental matters, a far more intelligent man than I, who went to a university and took a degree. This generally confuses the question before us, and, as we shall see, the confusion cannot be altogether avoided. To avoid it as far as possible I shall take ‘intelligence,’ in what follows, to mean that kind of mental activity which is fostered by the system or systems of ‘ education’ for the time being in vogue throughout the Western world.

Again, in the case of Germany, whose present behavior raises the question in the acutest form, we have to reckon with the fact that the people, who are the most highly ‘educated’ in Europe, do not, strictly speaking, control their corporate affairs. To many minds the essential tragedy of the situation arises from the fact that, whereas Prussian Junkerism, which rules, is a stupid thing, the German people, whom it rules, are extremely intelligent. But this only causes the original question to return in another form: why does the intelligence of the many submit to be governed by the stupidity of the few?

In all the discussions of this subject which I have encountered, it has been taken for granted that the relation of intelligence to good government was simple and direct; that is to say, the higher the level of intelligence or education in the individual members, the greater would be the wisdom and efficiency of their concerted action in a state. The political argument for education is usually based on that ground, as for example by Mill in his essay on ‘Liberty.’ The argument is, that the combined action of men in democracies can be trusted to yield good results just in so far as the individuals taking part in the combination have been educated to take an intelligent view of their own and of the common interest.

At first sight this view seems plausible enough, so plausible indeed as to be accepted by most persons without criticism. But it hardly does justice to the complexities of the situation, and may even be said to overlook some elementary facts. To begin with, it is fairly obvious that the initial willingness to combine does not increase in direct relation to the intelligence of the individuals to whom combination is proposed, — unless, indeed, we so manipulate the meaning of intelligence (which some philosophers have done) as to equate it with the very willingness aforesaid. I can well conceive that a million ignorant and foolish persons would be far more willing to combine in the hope of correcting each other’s mistakes and making good each other’s defects, than would another million self-reliant and educated persons in the hope of concentrating their gifts on a common end. These latter, with their highly developed powers of criticism, — directed, as they would be, upon one another,— would be far slower in finding a common basis of agreement and far more inclined to hesitate before committing themselves to common action. And even if this initial difficulty were overcome, the effectiveness of the union would be menaced by the very same causes which had hindered its inception. It is notoriously hard for extremely clever people to hold together. The cohesion of the group is apt to decline in consequence of the alacrity and effectiveness with which each of the members brings his critical powers to bear on the proposals of his confederates. This explains the well-known condition in democratic states, that as the general level of intelligence rises among the individual citizens, the tendency to split up into parties becomes more marked.

In educating the intelligence, it must never be forgotten that it is a critical faculty we are developing, and the bearing of this on the democratic union must be carefully considered. Recent history shows us pretty plainly what the bearing is. As education rises, the individuality of the educated citizen asserts itself more and more; the groups consequently become more numerous, better organized, and more effective for purposes of group-warfare. Just because of the growing intellectual ability of the groups, their mutual oppositions become more active; and the result is that common action is retarded, and a multitude of well-meant designs, originated by intelligence, are thwarted by intelligent opposition.

In weighing the performance of democracies we ought to take account, not only of what they have done, but of what they have failed to do, from the cause of which I am now speaking. So absorbed are we in looking at one side of the picture that nobody, so far as I am aware, has found it worth his while to tell the story of all the promising schemes for human improvement which, within the memory of living men, have been endlessly delayed, or even criticized out of existence, by the highly developed, though possibly mistaken, intelligence of opposing parties. The story, if told in democratic countries, would be too humiliating to be popular. And of the many excellent schemes which have been carried into effect by democratic action, may we not say with perfect truth that some of them ought to have been carried out, and would have been carried out, much earlier, had it not been for the retarding action of the critical intelligence possessed by highly educated individuals?

At all events it is a great mistake to conceive of the intelligence of a democratic state as though it were a huge sum total formed by the process of adding together the separate intelligences of its individual members. Under the party system, which, we have seen, grows more active and more complex with a rising level of education, a large part, sometimes the largest part, of individual intelligence does not go into common action at all. It is either spent in thwarting the equal, though otherwise-minded, intelligence of the rest, or is itself thwarted by the same process. It is ideally conceivable, though I do not suggest it as the least likely, that the minds of the citizens might each be ‘educated’ to such a point of critical effectiveness that no common action whatever could take place — just as a multitude of forces acting from different directions on a common point may keep the body on which they impinge in a state of rest. If ‘intelligence’ were a simple force always acting in the same direction, — if to be intelligent meant that we should always agree with the views of the person who bids us educate that faculty, — then of course the result of education would be that every fresh individual would represent so much force added to those progressive tendencies of which our instructor approved. But intelligence has not this unitary meaning. It is apt to assume a multitude of different forms which show no disposition to act in concert, and the more educated it is, the more do these differences assert themselves.

Hence it is that no simple and direct relation can be assumed between the wisdom or effectiveness of corporate action in a democracy and the degree of education attained by the individual members. We may even have to prepare ourselves for the action of a law similar to that of diminishing returns in agriculture.

Ten simple persons acting together may perform an action far wiser than any one of the cooperators, if left to himself, could either design or accomplish; whereas ten educated persons acting together may embark on courses which display a much lower level of intelligence than that on which each cooperator severally stands. This may still hold good, even in cases where the corporate action of the educated group is judged to be more intelligent than the corporate action of the simple group; just as, in economic theory, a piece of land which has fallen under the law of diminishing returns may produce a greater yield than another piece whose yield is still on the increase. What I am suggesting is that the intellectual superiority of corporate over private action tends to increase only up to a certain point in the development of individual intelligence; that after this point has been reached the relation is reversed, the actions of the state tending to fall below the level of wisdom demanded by the intellectual culture of its component members; until at last a condition may be reached in which the individual is justified in declaring the state — or the law — to be an ass. I know not how otherwise to explain the enormous stupidity which has plunged the educated nations of Europe into the present war.

Certainly no surprise need be felt at the extreme slowness, at the numerous delays and setbacks, to which we have now grown so well accustomed (in this country at all events) in the progress of reform. This slowness is due in no small measure to the hindrances caused by intelligent criticism. Whether it amounts to a practical advantage or the reverse, I do not here discuss. Delay may be always an advantage; assuredly it sometimes is. But I can see no reason why certain measures, admittedly good when they are carried, are any the better for having been before the public thirty or forty years. And the same applies to schemes now under consideration. Should the time ever come, for instance, when the community shall devise a scheme for putting an end to war, it will doubtless be a great source of satisfaction to reflect that our young men are no longer perishing by the hundred thousand on the battlefield. But we must not forget the millions who did perish while we were engaged in talking the matter over, and answering arguments on the other side. In this and in other matters of great democratic interest, it is possible that the less highly educated communities of the world, when they get their democratic opportunity, will give a lead to those more highly educated communities which have had the opportunity so long. It would be no surprising thing, for example, if the Russian peasants, with their kind hearts, their simple notions of right and wrong, and their incapacity for sustained reasoning, were to show one day (perhaps not far off) a rate of progress in democratic achievement which would be the envy of the Western world.

A revaluation of human faculties is, under these circumstances, inevitable; and I think there is evidence that it has begun. ‘The kind heart of a Russian moujik is a more valuable asset to civilization than the mighty brain of a German professor.’ ‘A young British subaltern with his notion of “playing the game” is a finer tactician than the most astute member of the German General Staff.’ These, too, are remarks I have recently heard. They may help to explain a fact which many of our friends in neutral countries have found hard to understand, — the fact, I mean, that we British feel quite at home in our alliance with Russia. We feel that while the kind-hearted Russian needs to take only one step forward to place himself in line with our ideals of civilization, the intellectual German will have to take a hundred steps backward before he can recover the lost path of human progress. German culture is a garment which does not fit the British character at all; and I must confess that some of our British thinkers who have worn that garment most consistently have often impressed me as a man does who is wearing clothes made for somebody else. The Russian ethos, on the other hand, fits the human part of us quite well, though it has still to be adapted to the political. The worst things that Russia has done in her political history — and they have been very bad — seem to have arisen in no small degree from her imitation of Teutonic methods. And some of the worst features of our own history have arisen from a not dissimilar source. But when these imitations have ceased, — and the war has opened the eyes of both Russia and Britain to the need of ending them, — the Russians and British may then discover a kinship of spirit, which the wide difference of race has so far obscured, but which none the less is deep and fundamental. The picture of Russian character recently disclosed by Mr. Stephen Graham is, in many of its essential features, wonderfully homelike. In them we recognize the traits of an ideal which is dear to the British spirit. We have before us a vision of that ’plain heroic magnitude of mind’ which Milton praised as mightier than all diplomacies and ‘ammunitions.’ Hitherto we have misunderstood both the German and the Russian. We have overestimated the German head. We have underestimated the Russian heart.

What further results will follow the discovery of this kinship it would here be out of place to answer in detail. But I think those prophets are deeply in error who predict that the end of the war will find Russia and Britain quarreling over the spoils. I believe we shall find that we are dealing with a great and generous nation, a nation which honors its word. If the war teaches any lesson to our respective countries, it will be that of discarding to the uttermost the German method of either beginning or ending a dispute. To both nations the lesson will be easier to learn than appears on the surface. Russia is not a dirty fighter, and will not make a dirty conqueror. I will even venture the assertion that Russia, in spite of all appearance to the contrary, is readier at this moment than any nation in Europe for a genuinely human polity. In outward organization she seems far from its attainment, but inwardly and spiritually she is perhaps nearer to it than other nations (including our own) which have advanced further than she has in the formal practice of democracy.

V

These last considerations lead me to speak in conclusion of our changing attitude of mind to the intellectual culture of Germany. I am afraid we must plead guilty to the charge, made by the Germans themselves against us, that our attitude for a long time past has been one of subservience. We have borrowed our thought from Germany. We have, to use a vulgar phrase, been ‘fed up’ with German metaphysics and German views of the Christian religion. Could we eliminate from recent British philosophy and theology all they owe to German sources, what would remain? Not much, I must confess, that is original. Since the time of Mill and Spencer our leading thinkers in philosophy have been little more than commentators, more or less enlightened, on the great German masters. A revolt against this dominance had indeed begun long before the war broke out, but its originator was not a British thinker: he was William James; and though the revolt had spread to Britain, it cannot be said to have effected more than a partial liberation from the Germanic tradition.

Now I am far from suggesting that the war is going to convert us all to Pragmatism; I am not even sure that Pragmatism as such will derive any confirmat ion from the present course of events. But I do suggest that the war will deepen and possibly complete, so far as Great Britain is concerned, the revolt against German dominance in thought of which Pragmatism was so significant a symptom. Logically, indeed, there may be no connection between German philosophy and the crime which originated the war, or the unexampled ferocity with which Germany has carried it on. Germany may be wrong in her politics but right in her philosophy. But though, logically, the two propositions may stand, I doubt if it is psychologically possible to hold them together. It is certain at all events that the German interpretation of life and the German interpretation of morals and religion stand discredited in the British mind by their juxtaposition with the hideous crime committed on Belgium. Henceforth we shall be unable to think of the one thing without remembering the other, and the tendency, hitherto prevalent, to accept what comes to us in the way of thought from Germany will be replaced by a doubt as to the competence of our guide. Instead of the will to believe in German thinkers, there will be a will to disbelieve in them, and we shall criticize where formerly we were prone to accept. I should not be surprised, therefore, if in the near future we have to witness a marked reaction from all movements of thought which are known to have a German origin. This attitude of mind could not be better expressed than in a remark recently made by an intelligent workingman who, like so many workingmen in this country, was acquainted with the now popular works of Haeckel. He had been reading the manifesto of the German professors on the war, of which Haeckel was one of the signatories. ’What. . . rot!’ he said. ’And this is the man who pretends to answer the Riddle of the Universe! No more Haeckel for me!’ This, I repeat, may be bad logic, but it is intelligible psychology. And though I should be sorry to attribute the precise phraseology of this workingman to theologians and philosophers, I yet venture to think that something is now moving in the philosophic and theologic heart of Britain which, if pressed into utterance, would say, ‘No more Kant, no more Hegel, no more Strauss, no more Nietzsche, no more Harnack, no more Eucken — for me!’ There is some insularity in all this, no doubt. But there is also a great deal of human nature. And human nature is the one subject which the Germans, with all their learning, have so far failed to comprehend.