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and manners and customs. At any rate, their conceit survived every vicissitude.

The forays which the medieval German kings made recurrently into Italy did not, by introducing the Germans to peoples more civilized than themselves, suggest to them that their own ways and natures could be improved upon. Even the Reformation, which promised at the outset to give Germany not only leadership, but really close relations with the other Powers, soon became local, having in each country its peculiar form and special aims; so that the German States, disunited, discordant, dull, fell back into that parochial frame of mind in which egotism flourishes. It is a nice question whether egotism is more insufferable in those who are down or those who are up; the Prussians were equally arrogant, whether in victory or in defeat.

Frederick the Great sent to France for exemplars of civilized wit and manners; he spoke French, he wrote French; but his loyal subjects never took this as a hint that they were

less civilized than the French, and Frederick himself did not object to their dulness and bad manners, so long as they furnished him the docile soldiers and bureaucrats whom he needed.

We can hardly lay too much stress on the German self-conceit as an important element in bringing Germany to the condition where she would embark exultingly in the Atrocious War. After 1870, a modest Prussian would have been an anachronism. The Empire stood at the head of Europe; its scholars led the world. It extended applied science, not only into the larger domain of industry, but into the concerns of daily life. It perfected, piece by piece, the immense machine, of which the Kaiser held the throttle. And when the word went forth from above that the Germans were the Chosen People, before whom a destiny of illimitable grandeur opened, hardly a German skeptic challenged that announcement, which merely confirmed what each of them and his ancestors had taken for granted, since Her

mann vanquished the Romans in the Teutoburg forest. To keep playing on the chord of egotism, which set every Teuton heart vibrating, was the obvious policy of the Imperial Ring.

CHAPTER V

THE KAISER AND GOTT PARTNERSHIP

He created Gott in his own image.

UT for the presence of William II, the

BUT

Bambition of the Imperial Ring might

have waited long before it embarked recklessly on a world-war in order to gratify its ambition. We cannot yet say—perhaps perhaps posterity will never be able to determine how far the Kaiser was unwittingly the tool of the Ring and how far he shaped it to his own purposes. At least we may be sure that the Ring would have thwarted him unless it had found him satisfactory. Had he attempted to establish a free government, for instance, his path would have been blocked by Junkers; or if he had acceded to the proposal of the other great Powers to restrict armament, he would not have been popular with the German military

caste.

But there was never any likelihood that he

would do these or any other Liberal acts. He was a Hohenzollern through and through one of the Hohenzollerns on whose stem the shoot of semi-savage Prussianism, grafted centuries before, had grown luxuriantly. His first object was to Prussianize Germany; his next, to Germanize the world. Versatile and neurotic, his conceit soon developed into unchecked egomania. At the outset, the minute German specialists smiled when he laid down the law to them in Biblical criticism, or in painting, in history, or in army tactics, or in a hundred other fields; but after a while they listened to him gravely, as to Sir Oracle. Their obsequiousness, which cost them little, brought them his favors for themselves and his backing for their enterprises. He Prussianized Germany in ways I have already hinted at, until the reluctant Bavarians or the suspicious Würtembergers came to regard Imperial German aggrandizement as the leading tenet in their patriotic creed.

William's egomania revolved on two wheels

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