aggression, has given a new reading to the Gospel: 'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.'
Nietzsche, who, though he strove to upset the old Hebrew values, saw clearly through the real Prussian peril, defined such a State as that 'in which the slow suicide of all is called Life,' and 'a welcome service unto all preachers of death'-a cold, ill-smelling, monstrous idol. Nor is this the only affinity between Prussia and Japan. 'We are,' boasts a Japanese writer, 'a people of the present and the Tangible, of the Broad Daylight and the Plainly Visible.'
But Germany was not always thus. 'High deeds, O Germans, are to come from you,' wrote Wordsworth in his 'Sonnets dedicated to Liberty.' And it throws light upon the nature of Missions to recall that when she lay at the feet of Napoleon after Jena, the mission proclaimed for her by Fichte was one of peace and righteousness-to penetrate the life of humanity by her religion-and he denounced the dreams of universal monarchy which would destroy national individuality. Calling on his people as 'the consecrated and inspired ones of a Divine world-plan,' 'To you,' he says, 'out of all other modern nations the germs of human perfection are especially committed. It is yours to found an empire of mind and reason-to destroy the dominion of rude physical power as the ruler of the world.' And throwing this mission backwards, he sees in what the outer world calls the invasion of the Roman Empire by the Goths and Huns the proof that the Germans have always stemmed the tide of tyrant domination. But Fichte belonged to the generation of Kant and Beethoven. Hegel, coming a little later, though as non-nationalist as Goethe, and a welcomer of the Napoleonic invasion, yet prophesied that if the Germans were once forced to cast off their inertia, they, 'by preserving in their contact with outward things the intensity of their inner life, will perchance surpass their teachers': and in curiously prophetic language he called for a hero 'to realize by blood and iron the political regeneration of Germany.'
If Treitschke, too, believed in force, he had a high moral ideal for his nation. The other nations are feeble and decadent. Germany is to hold the sceptre of the nations, so as to ensure the peace of the world. It is only in Bernhardi that we find war in itself glorified as the stimulus of nations. Even this ideal has a perverted nobility; as Pol Arcas, a modern Greek writer, says: 'If the devil knew he had horns the cherubim would offer him their place.' And though it was only in the swelled head of the conqueror that the brutal philosophy of the Will-to-Power germinated, it was not so much the 'blood and iron' of Junkerdom that perverted Prussia-Junkerdom still lives simply-as the gross industrial prosperity that followed on the victory of 1870. A modern German author describes his countrymen-it is true he has turned Mohammedan, probably out of disgust-as tragically degenerated and turned into a gold-greedy, pleasure-seeking, title-hungry pack. This industrial transformation of the nobler soul of Germany is by Verhaeren-attacking Judaism from another angle-ascribed to its Jews, so it is comforting to remember that when England started the East India Company there was scarcely a Jew in England. No, Germany is clearly where England was in the seventeenth century, and in Prussia England meets her past face to face. Her past, but infinitely more conscious and consequent than her 'Rule, Britannia' period, with a ruthless logic that does not shrink from any conclusions. While England's right hand hardly knew what her left was doing, Germany's right hand is drawing up a philosophic justification of her sinister activities. There is in Henry James's posthumous novel-'The Sense of the Past'-a young man who gets locked up in the Past and cannot get back to his own era. This is the fate that now menaces civilization. Nor is the civilization that followed the struggle for America by the scramble for Africa entirely blameless. Germany, federated too late for the first mêlée and smarting under centuries of humiliation-did not Louis XIV insolently seize Strassburg?-is avenging on our century the sins of the seventeenth.
So far from Germanism being synonymous with Judaism, its analogies are to be sought within the five maritime countries which preceded Germany, albeit less efficiently, in the path of militarism. It is the same alliance as prevailed everywhere between the traders and the armies and navies, and the Kaiser's crime consists mainly in turning back the movement of the world which through the Hague Conferences was approaching brotherhood, or at least a mitigation of the horrors of war. His blasphemies are no less archaic. He repeats Oliver Cromwell, but with less simplicity, while his artistic aspiration complicates the Puritan with the Cavalier. 'From childhood,' he is quoted as saying, 'I have been under the influence of five men-Alexander, Julius Cæsar, Theodoric II, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon.' No great man moulds himself thus like others. It is but a theatrical greatness. But anyhow none of these names are Jewish, and not thus were 'the Kings of Jerusalem' even 'six thousand years ago.' Our kings had the dull duty of copying out and studying the Torah, and the Rabbis reminded monarchy that the Torah demands forty-eight qualifications, whereas royalty only thirty, and that the crown of a good name is the best of all. Compare the German National Anthem 'Heil dir im Siegeskranz' with the noble prayer for the Jewish King in the seventy-second psalm, if you wish to understand the difference between Judaism and Germanism. This King, too, is to conquer his enemies, but he is also to redeem the needy from oppression and violence, 'and precious will their blood be in his sight.'
VII
If I were asked to sum up in a word the essential difference between Judaism and Germanism, it would be the word 'Recessional.' While the prophets and historians of Germany monotonously glorify their nation, the Jewish writers as monotonously rebuke theirs. 'You only have I known among all the families of the earth,' says the message through Amos. '
Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento,
the Æneid told the all-invading Roman, putting of course the contemporary ideal backwards-as all missons are put-and into the prophetic mouth of Jove:-
Hae tibi erunt artis, pacisque imponere morem,
Parcere subjectis et debelare superbos.
It was for similarly exalted purposes that Israel was to occupy Palestine, yet with what unique denigration the Bible turns upon him: 'Not for thy righteousness or for the uprightness of thy heart dost thou go to possess this land; but for the wickedness of these nations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee.'
In English literature this note of 'Recessional' was sounded long before Kipling. Milton, though he claimed that 'God's manner' was to reveal himself 'first to His Englishmen,' added that they 'mark not the methods of His counsel and are unworthy.'
'Is India free,' wrote Cowper, 'or do we grind her still?' 'Secure from actual warfare,' sang Coleridge, 'we have loved to swell the war-whoop.' For Wordsworth England was simply the least evil of the nations. And Mr. Chesterton has just written a 'History of England' in the very spirit of a Micah flagellating the classes 'who loved fields and seized them.' But if in Germany a voice of criticism breaks the chorus of self-adoration, it is usually from a Jew like Maximilian Harden, for Jews, as Ambassador Gerard testifies, represent almost the only real culture in Germany. I have been at pains to examine the literature of the German Synagogue, which if Germanism were Judiasm, ought to show a double dose of original sin. But so far from finding any swagger of a Chosen People, whether Jewish or German, I find in its most popular work-Lazarus's 'Soziale Ethik im Judentum'-published as late as November, 1913, by the League of German Jews-a grave indictment of militarism. For the venerable philosopher, while justly explaining the glamour of the army by its subordination of the individual to the communal weal, yet pointed out emphatically that what unites individuals separates nations. 'The work of justice shall be peace,' he quotes from Isaiah. I am far from supposing that the old Germany of Goethe and Schiller and Lessing is not still latent-indeed, we know that one Professor suggested at a recent Nietzsche anniversary that the Germans should try to rise not to Supermen but to Men, and that another now lies in prison for explaining in his 'Biologie des Krieges' that the real objection to war is simply that it compels men to act unlike men. So that, when moreover we remember that the noblest and most practical treatise on 'Perpetual Peace' came from that other German
