Page:The History of The Great European War Vol 1.pdf/68

 commercial ethics. More popularly stated, in German terms now though, it is that every nation has the right to get the best of any other nation, so long as it does not offend the law—the law in these matters being a very illusive abstraction. So in business in the everyday transactions of buying and selling we have the legal principle of Caveat emptor—"let the purchaser beware"; in other words the seller is entitled to effect his sale by any means at his disposal other than legally fraudulent means. So with commercial contracts in general, only in one or two instances does commercial law require that the parties should act to one another in respect to the contract in perfect good faith. It can, therefore, be very fairly claimed, as obvious to the German super-intelligence, that in international dealings no State, in the ordinary way, need have much regard to the obligations of good faith in its dealings with another State. Though international law and custom takes credit to itself as being a system of morality, no instance can be shown where it has been suggested by its authoritative exponents that its morality may be taken as of a finer quality than that of municipal law. From the foregoing position it is an easy step to the first characteristic principle of Pan-Germanism—" that might is right." As to the validity of this principle Prusso-Germanic political teaching will never under any circumstances have the slightest doubt. That is its justification for the despotism of the Kaiser and his Government.

But when we come to consider Germany and its world-ambitions, in relation to outside Powers, then this very despotism is to be relied on in time of war as some sort of an element of strength, for it ensures, in some primitive fashion that appeals most forcefully to the Teutonic mind, unity of purpose, concentration of energy, and discipline. The Germany that will fight is to be a machine. It may have the limitations of machinery, but it also will have its advantages—an absence of sensitiveness, like a steam roller.

The Germans move on from an appreciation of these two first principles to a remarkable belief in the necessary and inevitable destiny of their Empire. Influenced by the exaggerated tributes paid by the Kaiser to the largely imaginary warlike history of Prussia and the Germans, and dazzled by the fabled achievements of their heroes of the past, as they are now elaborately gilded and upheld for admiration, the German people, ignorant of the real fact that for centuries their race, from the point of view of warlike achievement, had been nothing but the subsidised lackeys of Europe, have become obsessed with the