The steady drill, the hammered din,
The quiet heart of discipline–
Grant us our hour–to arm!
Arthur H. Adams.
All things considered, you cannot help sympathising a little with Germany's outcry against the deceptive character of the British Empire. When an eminent physician has carefully diagnosed a patient's complaint and pronounced, quite emphatically, that he cannot possibly survive for more than a very brief period, it is up to that patient to fade away within the time limit prescribed for him. Otherwise, he must not expect his doctor to be pleased, or to express any but uncomplimentary opinions concerning his behaviour and the general defects of his system. Well, as everybody knows, Treitschke, Bernhardi, and other accomplished German professors devoted many years of their valuable lives to feeling the pulse of John Bull, and they found that, by all the known laws of science, he was on his last legs. They assured the world at large, with the portentous cocksureness so peculiarly German, that he was so far gone that a properly administered shock was certain to bring about his immediate dissolution. The shock was administered all right; Germany saw to that; but instead of keeping to his part of the programme and dying, John promptly woke up, got out of bed, developed a lot more legs than anybody had credited him with, and has ever since been firmly standing on them all.
And Germany is naturally indignant at this. What is the use of scientific laws if they can thus be disregarded with impunity? Bernhardi praised the British for some things, but he was sure he knew what he was talking about, and most of the things they had done were much too foolish to obtain his approbation. He explained how we had neglected to train up our Colonies in the way they should go; we had never sternly imposed our own kultur on any of our "subject peoples"; we exercised no control over Australasia, Canada, South Africa: we had failed to hold them in subjection, and they were rapidly losing all trace of the British spirit and would not remain permanently within the Empire. Moreover, India and Egypt were seething with disaffection, he said, and if a beneficent Germany only gave them half a chance they would break into open revolt and throw off the hated British yoke. He had studied the whole position most thoroughly and foresaw hopeful possibilities of great Colonial rebellions–Australasia, Canada, South Africa would decide before long to become independent States, and the old country would have to go out and fight them in order to reduce them to submission, and then would come Germany's golden opportunity. But it might not be necessary to wait for those rebellions. If ever England were involved in a big war nearer home, the shrewd Bernhardi was quite convinced that the self-governing Colonies would naturally consult their own interests and decline to take any part in it. He laid it down emphatically that, at all events (to quote from Mr. Allen H. Powles's translation of his "Germany and the Next War"), "the Colonies can be completely ignored so far as concerns any European theatre of war."
All which indicates what a strange gulf there must be between the fossilised Prussian mind and the mind of a modern civilisation. These pretentious speculations looked so profound, and were actually so shallow; yet, simply by taking themselves seriously, the German professors and militarists bluffed most of the world into accepting them as masterly students of psychology. There is something amusing in the essentially Prussian idea that we were ignorant of the art of Empire-building because we had not held our Colonies firmly in subjection and forced our own kultur upon our "subject peoples" and thus have made them indissolubly one with us. We have not done so for two reasons. For one, they would never have allowed us to do it; the men of British blood are not so docile as that, thank heaven! And for another, as a nation we have no such stupid, swaggering desire to lord it over our fellows. We had once, but have outgrown it. As for sending our armies out to make war on the great free Colonies if they resolved to set up as independent States–they are independent already, and if ever they decided to sever the formal, natural tie that links them easily with ourselves in a federated Empire, no Government in Great Britain would be so foolish as to do anything but reluctantly acquiesce in their decision.
Britain fought her sons of yore–
Britain failed; and nevermore,
Careless of our growing kin,