The Battle of Dorking

There were critics, even English critics, who have taken so superficial a view of history and humanity as to ask why we should support France, with our blood and treasure, when in morale and intellect it is perhaps the candid truth that we are more on the side of her enemy.

It is scarcely necessary to urge in reply that France, if not the one great continental nation, is the one great people of parallel and contemporary development to our own, our comrade, our rival, our nearest social (if not racial) kin, and that, spite of all her decadence and even degradation, upon the arena of Europe she stands for Humanity and Civilization against Absolutism and Brute Force.

And as we raised the world against her, when dominated by the tyrannous egoism of Bonaparte, the monstrous fungoid growth that overlaid her great Revolution and obscured her services to freedom, so now we stand as foes, not, we would fain believe, of the German people, but of the militarist clique, the Napoleonic nightmare that overpowers her moral instincts and clouds her honesty and intelligence. But here, again, let us not deceive ourselves as to the extent—perhaps to be all too fatally revealed—of “the force behind the Kaiser.” Germany of to-day stands for a compact mass of highly energized (though not yet politically conscious) material and intellectual vigour. That a group of principalities, obsessed by militarist and petty-aristocratic traditions, should within half a century of their amalgamation form a politically great and united people, could scarcely be expected.

But if not fully organized on the representative lines to which we attach so much importance, Germany presents a united front of intelligence, commercial industry and ambition with which her rapidly increasing population pushes on, eager for new worlds to conquer.