It is scarcely conceivable that any people could be called upon to make a greater or more sudden exhibition of—their peculiar qualities.
What will be the verdict upon our own? That we are wilfully misunderstood, misrepresented, must matter little to us, if we have the moral support of a public opinion which will, if we triumph, be more powerful for good than ever before.
Nor need we fear its ultimate perversion by interested slander. The hostile demonstrations of the German intellect during the early stages of this war have scarcely been on a par with those of its material force.
One of the latest of sophistical Imperialist ebullitions complains with somewhat forced pathos of our waging war with our former allies of Waterloo!
But we did not fight the French then because they were French, nor ally ourselves with Prussians because they spoke a guttural tongue. We fought then, as now, against the erection of an impossible and unbearable European tyranny, the local origin and nationality of which would have been quite immaterial to the main question.
Can we believe for a moment that the great German intellect has ever been under the slightest misapprehension of so very simple a matter?
War, honest war, may be Hell, as General Sherman described it. It is, at least, a form of Purgatory in which personality, nationality, are forces that count but little, while principle and motive (as was tragically exhibited in the great American struggle) are everything. Did not Christianity itself preach this kind of sanctified discord in which a novel sense of right, or the perception of higher ideal, should divide even the nearest and dearest, and set them at war not, as in old days, by reason of any “family compact,” or mere racial tie, but for the sake of “Right,” and—so far as ordinary friendly or neighbourly relations were concerned—in utter “scorn of consequence.”
There, indeed, is the poignant tragedy of the case. To be at war with the countrymen of Schumann and Beethoven, of Goethe and Ranke, is not that an affliction to the very soul of England, an outrage to feelings and instincts tangled up with the very core of our civilization?
Terrible, indeed, is it that there should be amities which, at such crises, we must
“tear from our bosom