[Footnote 1: For evidence of this see Cramb's Germany and England, p. 25.]

Law, Justice, Responsibility, Liberty, Citizenship—the words are abstractions, philosophers' phrases, destitute, it might seem, of living meaning and reality. There is no such thing as English Justice, English Liberty, English Responsibility. The qualities that go to the making of free and ordered institutions are not national but universal. They are no monopoly of Great Britain. They are free to be the attributes of any race or any nation. They belong to civilised humanity as a whole. They are part of the higher life of the human race.

As such the Germans, if they recognised them at all, probably regarded them. They could not see in them the binding power to keep a great community of nations together. They could not realise that Justice and Responsibility, if they rightly typify the character of British rule, must also typify the character of British rulers; and that community of character expressed in their institutions and worked into the fibre of their life may be a stronger bond between nations than any mere considerations of interest. Educated Indians would find it hard to explain exactly why, on the outbreak of the war, they found themselves eager to help to defend British rule. But it seems clear that what stirred them most was not any consideration of English as against German culture, or any merely material calculations, but a sudden realisation of the character of that new India which the union between Great Britain and India, between Western civilisation and Eastern culture, is bringing into being, and a sense of the indispensable need for the continuance of that partnership.[1]

[Footnote 1: The reader will again understand that it is British aims rather than British achievements which are spoken of. That British rule is indispensable to Indian civilisation is indeed a literal fact to which Indian opinion bears testimony; and it is the conduct and character of generations of British administrators which have helped to bring this sense of partnership about. But individual Englishmen in India are often far from understanding, or realising in practice, the purpose of British rule. Similarly, the growth of a sense of Indian nationality, particularly in the last few years, is a striking and important fact. But it would be unwise to underestimate the gigantic difficulties with which this growing national consciousness has to contend. The greatest of these is the prevalence of caste-divisions, rendering impossible the free fellowship and social intercourse which alone can be the foundation of a sense of common citizenship. Apart from this there are, according to the census, forty-three races in India, and twenty-three languages in ordinary use.]

It is just this intimate union between different nations for the furtherance of the tasks of civilisation which it seems so difficult for the German mind to understand. "Culture," with all its intimate associations, its appeal to language, to national history and traditions, and to instinctive patriotism, is so much simpler and warmer a conception: it seems so much easier to fight for Germany than to fight for Justice in the abstract, or for Justice embodied in the British Commonwealth. That is why even serious German thinkers, blinded by the idea of culture, expected the break-up of the British Empire. They could imagine Indians giving their lives for India, Boers for a Dutch South Africa, Irishmen for Ireland or Ulstermen for Ulster; but the deeper moral appeal which has thrilled through the whole Empire, down to its remotest island dependency, lay beyond their ken.

Let us look a little more closely at the German idea of national culture rather than national character as the chief element in civilisation. We shall see that it is directly contrary to the ideals which inspire and sustain the British Commonwealth, and practically prohibits that association of races and peoples at varying levels of social progress which is its peculiar task.

"Culture," in the German idea, is the justification of a nation's existence. Nationality has no other claim. Goethe, Luther, Kant, and Beethoven are Germany's title-deeds. A nation without a culture has no right to a "place in the sun." "History," says Wilamowitz in a lecture delivered in 1898, "knows nothing of any right to exist on the part of a people or a language without a culture. If a people becomes dependent on a foreign culture" (i.e. in the German idea, on a foreign civilisation) "it matters little if its lower classes speak a different language: they, too … must eventually go over to the dominant language…. Wisely to further this necessary organic process is a blessing to all parties; violent haste will only curb it and cause reactions. Importunate insistence on Nationality has never anywhere brought true vitality into being, and often destroyed vitality; but the superior Culture which, sure of its inner strength, throws her doors wide open, can win men's hearts."[1] In the light of a passage like this, from the most distinguished representative of German humanism, it is easier to grasp the failure of educated Germany to understand the sequel of the South African War, or the aspirations of the Slav peoples, or to stigmatise the folly of their statesmen in Poland, Denmark, Alsace-Lorraine, and Belgium. "Importunate insistence on Nationality"—the words come home to us now with a new meaning when we learn that in Belgium, now perforce "dependent on a foreign culture," babies are registered under German names and newspapers printed in "the dominant language," and that already "forty newspaper vendors in Brussels have been sentenced to long terms of hard labour in German prisons for selling English, French, and Belgian newspapers."[2] "Our fearless German warriors," writes the leading German dramatist, Gerhart Hauptmann,[3] "are well aware of the reasons for which they have taken the field. No illiterates will be found among them. Many of them, besides shouldering their muskets, carry their Goethe's Faust, some work of Schopenhauer, a Bible, or a Homer in their knapsacks." Such is a serious German writer's idea of the way in which civilisation is diffused!

[Footnote 1: Speeches and Lectures, pp. 147-148 (1913 edition).]

[Footnote 2: Daily Papers, October 12, 1914 (Exchange Telegram from
Rotterdam).]

[Footnote 3: Letter quoted in the Westminster Gazette.]