40 PHYSICAL FORCE 



less crowded countries of the earth. Everywhere 

 they were treated as friends and equals. There were 

 no restrictions as to their owning property or inter- 

 marrying with nationals in their adopted countries. 

 The feelings of Germans towards neighbouring 

 nations, and those whose hospitality they sought, 

 would be better described as the ordinary one of 

 national contempt rather than racial horror the 

 contempt which no nation, least of all ours, is free 

 from in its estimate of others. She thought she 

 could win, she knew what she wanted I am not 

 sure that we yet know and as, since the Franco- 

 Prussian War, she has always declared frankly was 

 the German method, she struck when she was ready 

 to strike, with no more thought or compunction than 

 if her neighbours had not been human beings. It is 

 commonly supposed that the completion of the Kiel 

 Canal fixed the exact time. The war has already 

 lasted long enough to show that she had to wait 

 for something vastly more fundamental. A group 

 of chemical processes technically referred to as the 

 fixation of atmospheric nitrogen had to be perfected 

 and put into practice in the especial form necessary 

 for her war needs, before she had any chance of 

 success, for on these new processes, cut off as she is 

 from most outside supplies, she depends for the raw 

 materials of explosives. It all seems to have been 

 nationally thought out in cold blood to the dotting 

 of the last i. Had it been successful they would 

 have gloried in it, as some of the more sanguine still 

 are glorying. 



We expect, of course, professional soldiers to 

 think along these lines and to act, under civil con- 

 trol, according to these tenets. But for an entire 

 nation once great in philosophy, literature and the 

 arts, once possessing an empire vastly wider than 

 the material possessions that can be seized and 



