One may understand at once from this situation, and from her past history, that Germany has the sound good sense not to be influenced by the latest school of sentimentalists, who pretend to believe that the world is a polyglot Sunday-school, with converted millionaires as teachers therein; or, if not that, a counting-house, where all questions of honor, race, religion, love, pride, all the questions which bubble their answers in our blood, are to be settled by weighing their comparative cost in dollars. We do not realize how new is this word sentimental. John Wesley, writing of this word "sentimental" as used in Sterne's "Sentimental Journey," says: "Sentimental, what is that? It is not English, it is not sense, it conveys no determinate idea. Yet one fool makes many, and this nonsensical word (who would believe it) is become a fashionable one."
Germany has been taught by bitter experiences, and harsh masters, that the ultimate power to command must rest with that authority which, if necessary, can compel people to obey. They recognize, too, the mawkish mental foolery of any plan of living together which ignores the part which physical force must necessarily play in any political or social life which is complete. They agree, too, as does every intelligent man in Christendom, that the appeal to reason is far preferable to an appeal to war. But, pray, what is to be done where there is no reason to appeal to? Are reasonable men to strip themselves of all armor, and suffer unreason to prevail?
An army or a fleet is no more an incitement to war among reasonable men, than a policeman is an incentive to burglary or homicide. An army is not a contemptuous protest against Christianity; it is a sad commentary on Christianity's failure and inefficiency. An army and a fleet are merely a reasonable precaution which every nation must take, while awaiting the conversion of mankind from the predatory to the polite.
As yet the Germans have not been overtaken by the tepid wave of feminism, which for the moment is bathing the prosperity-softened culture of America and England. It is a harsh remedy, but both America and England would gain something of virility if they were shot over. We are all apt enough to become womanish, agitated, or acidulous, according to age and condition, when we are reaping in security the fields cleared, enriched, and planted by a hardy ancestry of pioneers. There were no self-conscious peace-makers; no worshippers of those two epicene idols: a God too much man, and a man too much God; no devotees of third-sexism, in the days of Waterloo and Gettysburg, when we had men's tasks to occupy us.