"However, he, like our Gracchi, imagined that what was good for his time must necessarily be good for all times. On the basis of a complete ignorance of the Continent, that is, of the Power that has always been and always will be the real regulator of the fundamental policy of England, Cobden thought he had got hold of an absolute truth, instead of a merely passing and temporary measure. Like all nations that have never gone through social and political cataclysms and are necessarily highly conservative, the English are totally lacking in historic perspective. Men of the class of Cobden, or such as the orator I had heard, are like their most renowned thinker, Herbert Spencer, absolutely devoid of historic thinking. They think in categories of quantity and matter; never in quality made by history.
"Columbus, who was with me, said:
"'You need not be unusually excited over what you see. Each nation cuts a different caper to the riddles and problems of life. The French, who used to be des hommes, while at present alas! they are only des omelettes, were in their prime of an aggressive attitude to all that touched them; the Germans were of an idealising temper, while their present mood is rather a tampering ideal; the Americans are full of the exploiting fever; and the English invariably take up a posture of expectativeness.
"'They pretend to believe what the Spartan King Archidamus always said: "One cannot by reasoning disentangle the future." This attitude pays the English best. First they let it be proved by the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and more particularly by the French that India can be conquered, and then—they take it. Even so with Egypt, Canada, the West Indies, and South Africa. Expectativeness is their motto.
"'When I came to England trying to persuade them to help me in the discovery of America, they acted the wise Archidamus, and would not give me linen for one sail. When I had discovered it, then they took as much of it, and more than they could swallow. This method of expectativeness has had much historic quality, to use your words, O Cæsar, for a time. But I am afraid it is beginning to be worn out.
"'I for one know (and have you, and Pericles, and Joan of Arc, and Napoleon, and so many others not told me the same thing when we used to meet, at the wish of Joan, at Rheims Cathedral?), I for one know what these little ones do not even dream of, so infatuated are they with the power of Reason and Science and similar machinery, namely, that our force to forefeel things of the future is far greater, at least in some of us, than our capacity to analyse or comprehend things of the present or the past. Our whole being is not so much an upshot of the past as a projection of the future. Hence the astounding assurance with which all of us now assembled in Olympus felt in advance what later on we actually did carry out. I should have discovered America had it never existed; as I actually discovered it thinking that I discovered the eastern side of Asia.'
"I very well see," said Cæsar, "what you mean. The English have no forefeeling of things to come. They do not note that their whole situation in historic space has in the last generation completely changed, and that therefore their old method of expectativeness, which lived mainly on the blunders of other nations, has become quite obsolete. They are where we were after Zama, after the end of the Second Punic War, or the end of the third century B.C., as they say. So they are at the end of their second Hundred Years' War with France. But while we distinctly felt that after the Carthaginians, whom we had defeated, we were inevitably compelled to reduce the Macedonians, and not shrinking from our heavy task we did defeat them, though with tremendous effort; the English do shrink from doing what the uncommon sense of the future as well as the common sense of the present but too clearly tell them to do.
"The blunder of France and Spain which was the chief ally of England in former times, I mean, the blunder of these great nations in making war on England only at times when they had four to ten other wars on hand; that capital blunder the dominating Power of this moment will never commit.
"Germany will not embroil herself in any Continental war while fighting England. This is indisputable.
"For the first time in modern times England will be at grips with a first-class Continental Power which is in a position to concentrate all her strength on England. This completely novel situation requires completely novel methods of meeting it. Yet, the average Englishman is quite unaware of all that. What ruined mighty Macedon? Not the lack of a powerful army, since our oldest generals, such as Æmilius Paulus, trembled at the thunderlike onslaught of the famous Macedonian phalanx, or infantry. But instead of joining the Carthaginians full-heartedly while we smarted under the scourge of Hannibal, they misread the whole situation and waited, and waited, until—we were able to concentrate upon them, even to incorporate the best Greek forces in our armies, and the end was disaster for Macedon.