THE ACCUSATION 189 



their habitual ways of thinking." To this catalogue of 

 the deadly sins of Idealism it is scarcely worth adding that 

 its founder, Hegel, " put the rights of the State in place of 

 the rights of the individual " ; or, that the Hegelian State 

 was concretely exemplified in Bismarck's career, ' ' who first 

 showed the modern world what could be done in the 

 political sphere by the thorough-going use of force and 

 fraud," and to "whose achievements ... we must add 

 the whole series of trials in which the event has apparently 

 favoured the methods of blood and iron, and discredited 

 the cause of liberty and justice." 



Such, in a summarised form, is the testimony borne by 

 Mr. Hobhouse against the people of Britain. Let us look 

 at the catalogue of its vices. "Lust of empire abroad and 

 the vanity of racial domination " ; greed of commercial 

 gain at home ; a middle class almost wholly divorced from 

 public duties ; a people not educated beyond the desire for 

 its ' ' daily tale of bloodshed in the news-paragraphs, and, 

 if there were no real wars, murders or sudden deaths, would 

 expect the enterprising journalist to invent them " ; re- 

 ligious belief decaying ; humanitarianism scoffed at as 

 sentimentalism ; scepticism about the other world and 

 about the higher interests of this world ; political history 

 made to demonstrate the efficiency of blood and iron ; 

 physical science employed to cast its verdict in favour of 

 violence and against justice and to yield the conception 

 of a fatalism that makes remorse absurd and repentance 

 impossible ; idealism, converted into something still more 

 subtly poisonous, sapping intellectual and moral sincerity, 

 obscuring the difference between right and wrong, truth 

 and falsity all these together forming one current whose 

 united stream sweeps onward in full flood to the destruc- 



