Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/40

 line between Entente Allies and Germanic Allies, but by a vertical line between the aristocratic element and the democratic element. The set of ideas which I have quoted above were distinctly aristocratic in their aims and origins; by an aristocracy in secure control they were disseminated. But the other European aristocracies held exactly the same view—not so logically worked out perhaps, not so frankly expressed, but the same at the bottom. Lord Roberts, the venerable and respected British general, issued a kind of manifesto at the beginning of the war. Less brutal and feverish in expression, it is in thought the same thing as the mouthings of the German Junkers. “War is necessary for the souls of people,” he said in effect; “it is the tonic of races.” You heard the same sentiments from the French General Staff. The difference was only this: whereas in the Entente countries the democratic idea kept a balance with the aristocratic as in Great Britain and Italy, or maintained the ascendence as in France, the aristocratic element held in Germany the control over government, over most material activities, over most sources of public opinion. Germany, said the aristocrats of the neutral European nations, had made aristocracy scientific, brought it up to date, showed how it could he fastened on to a modern state. That was why these neutral aristocracies were one and all pro-German.

There were German dissenters, of course. There were in fact many of them, as the Social Democratic