Yet they have developed certain characteristic qualities in their social and political life, which distinguish them sharply from their western neighbours. History, which has deprived them, until recently, of a wider citizenship, has left them timid, docile, dreamy and unpractical in just that sphere of action where Englishmen have learnt for centuries to think and to act for themselves. Patriotism with Englishmen is an instinct. We do not much care to wave flags or make speeches or sing songs about it: we assume it as the permanent background of our national life and our national consciousness. With the Germans this is not so. In Germany, partly owing to German history, partly owing to the constitution of the German mind, patriotism is not an instinct but an _idea_. Now ideas do not grow up in men's minds by a natural process. They have to be implanted. The Germans have needed to be _taught_ to be patriotic. The makers of German patriotism a century ago were teachers and philosophers. They did not simply appeal to their patriotic instincts, as Englishmen would have done: they argued the point and _proved_ that Germany was worth fighting for: they founded a school of patriotic German philosophy. There are few more curious documents in history, or more instructive for the light they shed on future events, than the famous _Speeches to the German Nation_ addressed to his fellow-countrymen by the philosopher Fichte in 1808, when his country was under the heel of Napoleon. They are not speeches at all, but philosophical lucubrations, discussing in abstract terms the whole subject of the nature of patriotism and of Germany's right to exist as a nation. One argument, for instance, on which he lays great stress, is that Germany is marked out to be a great political power because of the peculiar excellence of the German language, which he shows to his satisfaction to be superior to French, Italian, and other Latin languages. Again, he points out that there is no word in the German language for "character" (_Karakter_), a word borrowed from the Greek; the reason is, he explains, that there is no need for one, because to have character and to be German are the same thing--a curious foretaste of the German arrogance of to-day. Yet these speeches, which, issued in England at such a crisis, would have found no readers, reverberated through Germany and helped to create the self-confident spirit which freed her from the invader. Then, as now, under the inspiration of ideas which they had accepted from professors and philosophers, Germans fought for the German language and for German culture. But whereas in 1814 they fought to preserve them, in 1914 they are fighting to impose them.