German "Kultur" means German progress, commercially and financially. German progress is by tariffs and commercial treaties. Her armies, her arms, and her armaments, are to support this "Kultur" and this progress.
I believe I have told the story as it has never been told before. But the facts cannot be drawn forth and properly set in review without some presentation of the spirit of the peoples of the European nations.
If all the nations of Europe were of one language, the spirit, the soul of each in its distinctive characteristics might stand out even more prominently than to-day.
Then we could see even more clearly the spirit of brotherhood and nationality that stands out resplendent as the soul of France. We should see the spirit of empire and of trade, interknit with administrative justice, as the soul of Great Britain. We should see Germany an uncouth giant in the center of Europe, viewing all about him with suspicion, and demanding to know why, as the youngest, sturdiest, best organized, and hardest working European nation, he is not entitled to overseas or world empire.
But few persons on this side have comprehended the relation of this great war to the greatest commercial prizes in the world; the shores of the Mediterranean, Asia Minor, with its Bagdad Railroad headed for the Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia with its great oil-fields, undeveloped and a source of power for the recreation of Palestine and all the lands between the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and Asia.
The greatest study for Americans to-day is the spirit of nations as shown in this war, and great lessons for the United States may be found in the finance, business, patriotism, and justice that stand forth in the British Empire as never before. She is rolling up a tremendous war-power within her empire and throughout Europe, encircling the German war-power. But she is likewise looking to her own people and her own workers, filling her own factories and every laboring hand to the full that she may keep her business and profits at home, and with her business and profits and accumulated capital and income prosecute the greatest war of history.
She is not unmindful in any respect of what the war may send her way. In the breaking-away and the breaking-up of Turkey, she sees a clear field for Egypt, the realization of the dream of Cecil Rhodes of the development of the whole of Africa by a Cape to Cairo Railroad, and she sees her own empire and peoples belting the world in power, usefulness, and justice, and with a sweep and scope for enterprise and development beyond all the previous dreams of this generation.