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Rh be humane. It is bound to be brutal and bloody, and the more brutal it is the speedier will be the end. Barbarities must be committed in order to strike terror into the invaded territories. In fact, massacres, murders, mutilation, arson and pillage—all the nameless horrors of which we have read but which I will not recapitulate—become the necessary and honourable instruments of war.

These are the general theories that underlie the German philosophy of war. Let us now see how they are to be translated into action. Germany, we are asked to believe, has a great historical mission to be the World-Power of the future. We, the British, with some pardonable vanity, but not, I hope, with indecent pride, have been apt to congratulate ourselves on being such a Power. That is a distinction which Germany conceives to be reserved for herself. The part that was filled by Rome in the ancient world, and for a short period in the Middle Ages by Islam, belongs henceforward to Germany, and it is for the Hohenzollern dynasty on earth, and the Almighty on high—because they work, according to the German theory, in active and constant co-operation—to consummate this divine destiny. Theirs it is to impose German culture, German civilization, and German morality upon a humbled world. Thus will they attain to the spiritual and material dominion of the universe. I say spiritual as well as material because, though we should not be surprised, in view of what has happened, if the German professors were to preach the gospel of secular domination or physical force, it is the spiritual and moral aspect of the gift which they are empowered to bestow that excites their warmest outbursts of self-satisfaction. Now let us see where we come in. I have often propounded the view that the British Empire is an organization, due partly to accident, partly to opportunity, but partly also to the qualities and virtues of our race, which has been charged, as we believe, by a Higher Power, with a mission to mankind, and that mission, I have contended, has been carried out, on the whole, with no small measure of justice, righteousness, and success. But apparently I was all wrong. For I take up these German books and I learn that England is the arch-enemy of humanity. She is the pirate State who has seized one-fifth of the universe by robbery, and only holds it by hypocrisy and fraud; while as regards our own people, they are so decadent, so sunk in sloth and selfishness as hardly to be worthy of consideration. In these circumstances it is