German conviction to take advantage of historic opportunities. Let us not, therefore, trust to any revolt against the Kaiser. He is no worse than many of his followers; indeed, he is not so bad. Until 1911, at least, he held them in leash. Let us rather try to understand Wilhelm II, for with him at present we must deal, and compared to many of his subjects he has mansuetude and a touch of gentility.

In the meantime we must seek to understand also a great but alien people of which he is in name and in fact the head. To understand this people we must seek out the springs which govern its actions. To compass it we must know to what stimuli it responds.

The central and ineradicable difference between America and Germany is the difference between freedom and autocracy, between feudalism and democracy. This has been repeated so frequently that we think we comprehend, but in reality we do not. Our most serious error, and it was one which we shared with our President, was to believe that the German autocracy was one which existed solely through the force of the ruler. The Kaiser's subjects, we said, are

unwilling slaves who have not cast him off only because they could not. This is worlds removed from the truth. The German state is not an amalgam forced into cohesion and unity by mere pressure from above. Austria is so in large part and it may disintegrate. Germany for the present will not. It is the most recent but at the same time the most powerful of all the great single states. Let us at least have learned this from four years of bitter experience. It has withstood many shocks, shocks which would have wrecked many a stanch commonwealth. For it has the two requisites of a stable and enduring state which Siéyès pointed out to Napoleon. "Power," he said, "must come from above. Confidence from below." And the German state has not only power and confidence coming from above and below, but the two are so subtly interfused that no allied statesman has yet been able to discover a serious split or any marked line of cleavage.

If Germany were what we imagined it to be, the war could have been ended quickly and almost without bloodshed. It would simply have been necessary for the allied aeroplanes to

deluge the German trenches and back lines with copies of President Wilson's speeches. One copy in the hands of each German soldier would have ended the conflict. When their officers were out of sight and hearing, and they often are, the privates would have held hurried whispered conferences. They would have waited until nightfall, have silently slunk over the top in platoons, have crossed through the hush of No Man's Land, and with a shout and sense of pride and relief have thrown themselves into the arms of their deliverers, the French, English, and American troops, who are in very truth fighting for liberty and justice. Why have they not done this?

In Austria, the President's speeches have been, and are, being heard, and to the Czecho-Slovaks, the Jugo-Slavs, they are becoming what they are to us, a charter for the future. Yet in Germany Woodrow Wilson's speeches are printed, garbled at times to be sure, but often in toto and without change, and the Chancellors Michaelis and Hertling have boldly answered them before the Reichstag and the country, and even combated his ultraliberal, just, and generous

terms of peace. The great mass of the people do not heed them, for they are listening to what for them is a higher music than that of the most ringing and eloquent expositions of humane and democratic principles ever pronounced by a statesman. To have expected the Germans to revolt after hearkening to them was as futile as it would have been to expect a mile-post to dance after we had whistled a jig. Why? The answer lies in a single phrase, almost as common in Germany as liberty in America. That phrase is Das Deutschtum.

Das Deutschtum is the secret of this war, of its deep-rooted origin, its progress, and its continuance. The German is fighting not for humanity, but as the Mohammedan fought and died for Islam, the German is fighting for Das Deutschtum. It explains Nietzsche and Kultur; it explains Pan-Germanism; it explains the push into the Balkans, the Bagdad Bahn. It explains the speech of Bethmann-Hollweg and the silence of the Reichstag; it explains the horrors of Belgium and the shelling of Rheims. It explains Gott strafe England, the sinking of the Lusitania, and the Lusitania medal; it

explains the Zimmermann note, German intrigue, and Brest-Litovsk. It explains the Kaiser, the Crown Prince, and the German butcher, baker, and candlestick-maker turned soldier, and, alas, only too often assassin. For Das Deutschtum is above our ideas of right and wrong. It is beyond good and evil.

It is more powerful than nature, it is greater than history, it is God's only hope of the world. Through it and through it alone can nature, history, and God realize themselves.

It seems preposterous. That is why we have not believed it. But it is the fact and we must face it, for we are fighting not the Kaiser, not the Crown Prince and the Junkers, not the German people. They exist only by and through it. We are fighting Das Deutschtum.

And what is Das Deutschtum ? It is the mystic conception of the mission, the power, and the privileges of the German people which is to be realized by the German state. It has no principles. It is above them. It has a programme. It seems simple and absurd. But equal absurdities have deluded great peoples, and in history the influence and power of a