December iS, 1915. 
L AND AND W A T E R 
dealing with that method what we have to remember is 
that it is one of the great outstanding- truths of history, 
not only that intellectual and spiritual ideas never have 
allied themselves with physical force, but further, that 
they have scrupulously divested themselves of the least 
trace of any such influence before they have been able to 
make their way in the world. 
What, then, is implied in this extraordinary concep- 
tion of Germany, running counter, as it does, to the 
history of the world,* that abstract ideas are to be 
taught and spread among mankind by force of arms ? 
What light dees it shed on German modes of thinking, on 
the German mind ? It does not, of course, stand alone. 
For a long time we have watched in all kinds of German 
activity a singlar inclination to rely on material agencies 
to the exclusion of all other. We have seen the qualities 
which ennoble war and exalt courage — mercy, generosity, 
chivalry and the like — swamped in a " frightfulness " 
which is an exhibition of war's exclusively material attri- 
butes. And not in war only, but in every motive attri- 
buted to ourselves, to our Colonies, or io Neutrals, in every 
forecast of events, in every argument employed to influence 
others, we have learnt to distinguish the same reliance on 
the grosser and m.ore material faculties, and the same 
ignorance, or at any rate neglect, of loftier and more dis- 
interested intuitions. 
The point we have been discussing, which is at the 
root of the Prussian philosophy, the notion, I mean, of 
asserting intellectual and spiritual ideas by material 
means, what is it indeed, but one more example of what 
is already so famihar to us, the materiaHsation during the 
last forty or fifty j-ears of the German mind ? Yet, one 
instance out of many though it is, it is worth drawing 
attention to, because it is fundamental. It reveals a bias, 
familiar to us in outward acts, as a distortion of the mind 
itself. The Greeks had a keen saying to distinguish 
between falsthood residing in arguments and falsehood 
•I am told that Mohammedanism is an exception. But it 
Is one that prove-s the rule. The Moslem faith, it is true, v/zs propagated 
by physical means, but it has appealed in consequence only to races in 
the physical or semi-barbarous stage of development. It has boon 
accepted by no people who have acquired the free use of their spiritual 
and intellectual faculties 
residing in mental bias. The former was superficial ancf 
further thought might correct it. The latter was 
intrinsic and, existing in the thinking machine itself, no 
amount of thought could ever correct it. This kind of 
fixed obliquity of vision they called having the lie in the 
seul. 
The German errf)r we have been discussing is of this 
fundamental kind. It is a bias which infects all conduct. 
Germany may regain her balance, but at present her every 
act testifies to the fact that her lower faculties have assumed 
control of the higher. The trial of Miss Cavell was a test 
case. It had a double aspect. If offered, on the one 
hand, technical ground and bare excuse for the outward 
act of \iolence ; it suggested on the other, appeals of 
quite exceptional keenness to every chivalrous and 
generous instinct in human nature. W'ith perfect sim- 
plicity and inevitability the German judges took the side 
of physical force and ignored the loftier motives. And if, 
before that act, the civihsed world recoiled with instinctive 
horror, it was not at the act itself so much at at something 
that act revealed. Calmly and deliberately carried out, 
it revealed the atrophy of the higher faculties in the 
German,mind. She was an agent of mercy, she was the 
friend of soldiers, she had succoured German wounded, 
she was a woman ; were there no faculties in the minds 
of her judges that could weigh such pleas as these ? None. 
But she had committed a mihtary offence which exposed 
her to physical retribution and, instantly responsive to such 
an appeal, her judges, having heard both sides and under- 
stood one, pronounced a sentence which was not less a 
sentence on themselves than on their victim. 
After all, is it not natural that fifty years of high 
pressure concentration on material issues — a concentration 
of unprecedented zeal yielding unprecedented results — 
should have some such consequences. Was it not in- 
evitable that, responding to such pressure, man's mind 
should grow warped by the development of the lower 
at the expense of the higher faculties ? It is that warping 
of the German mind,which has taken place gradually and 
?jid by slow degrees, which is now suddenly revealed in 
act and deed, and all the world thinks of Germany is but 
the inevitable consequence of that revelation. 
PUBLIC OPINION IN AMERICA. 
By Lewis R Freeman. 
{Mr. Lei&is Freeman, the writer of this article, 
is an eminent American journalist l\ 
A DISTINGUISHED official of the French 
Government, who went to the United States 
to be present at the opening of the Panama- 
Pacific Exposition at San Francisco last 
I'ebruary, was asked on his return to Paris regarding 
American opinion on the war. 
" I really have not quite made up my mind about it," 
was the reply, " and, by their questions, I hardly think 
the Americans have either. In New York they asked, 
' What do you think of the War ? ' In Chicago, . ' What 
does the War think of us ? ' In Omaha, ' What effect will 
the War have on wheat ? ' And in San Francisco, 
' What effect will the Exposition have on the War ? ' 
Yes, the Pacific Coast of America actually looked 
on ' Armageddon ' as a sort of side-show of their 
Exposition 1 " 
I cannot vouch for the truth of this story, but there 
is no denying that, in suggesting something of ithe inchoate 
state of American opinion, it was not without point. 
Amid the swirls and eddies of public sentiment — with 
one section of the country thinking of the War in terms 
of munition orders, another in terms of cotton, another 
in terms of wheat, and another in terms of Expositions- 
he must indeed be an individual of boundless assurance 
who will dogmatise to the extent of saying " America 
thinks thus about the War," or " America does not 
think thus about the War." And yet, in spite of the 
disturbed surface, the set of unmistakable undercurrents 
is discernible to even the mcst casual obser\'er — especially 
if he himself be not too deeply engulfed in the stream — 
and seme of these it may le both useful and interesting 
to indi( ate at this time. 
The War, besides bringing him orders for munitions 
— wth their incident train of gold and prosperity — has 
also had its educative effect on the .A-merican, and to an 
extent, perhaps, greater than he himself yet realises. 
To-day far more of him, for instance, would ask the 
European visitor " What do you think of the War ? " 
and far fewer of him would ask " What does the War 
think of us ? " than would have been the case a year ago. 
His horizon is broadening ; he is beginning to look out- 
ward where before he only looked inward. Appreciation 
of this changed attitude was well illustrated in a letter 
I recently received from the Editor of a New York review 
of wide circulation, discussing an article on the history of 
European colonial expansion. 
" The subject would have been an impossible one for 
our readers a year ago," he wrote, " but now they will 
follow it with interest and — what is more important — 
inteUigence. They are beginning to have a grasp of 
events going on beyond our own borders. I think the 
veil has lifted. As a nation we are to have a wider vision. 
The old three-mile limit of thought is gone. And ' let 'er 
go,' God bless her I " 
This does not mean that America as a whole has come 
anywhere near to understanding that, both on the score 
of honour and of expediency, she should have ranged 
herself on the side of the Allies at the outset instead of 
standing passively by and allowing Britain, France, 
Russia and Italy to fight for principles that were no less 
hers than theirs. Still less does it mean that America 
yet understands that both honour and self-interest — 
whether it is her ultimate lot to inter\-enc actively on the 
side of the Allies or not — should incline her to emerge from 
her traditional but now obsolete policy of isolation after 
the War and range herself in a defensive alliance with at 
least Great Britain and France that Mould give a pre- 
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