The seer who thus saw is Dr. Charles Sarolea, who recently came to the United States in the interests of his country, one of the most distinguished of Belgian scholars, a friend of King Albert, holder of Belgian decorations and honours from British learned societies, for the last fourteen years Belgian Consul in Edinburgh, and for the last twenty-one years head of the French and Romance Department at the University of Edinburgh. His vision was set out in “The Anglo-German Problem,” written in 1912, now published in an authorized American edition, perhaps the most accurate forecast which has been penned of to-day’s conflict, and certainly one of the most exact analyses of the German nation made before the world learned, since last August, to know it as it is—as Sarolea, master delineator of a nation’s character, drew it. Clear, sane, calm, logical, strong—such is Dr. Sarolea’s book, with its “rare perspicacity” and “remarkable sense of political realities,” in the words of King Albert’s appreciation of the work.
Dr. Sarolea, looking at Germany from the British Isles, where he was writing, perceived that “war is actually unavoidable” unless a spiritual miracle was wrought; that Europe was “drifting slowly but steadily toward an awful catastrophe.” Why? Because Germany was strong, envious, ambitious, conceited, arrogant, unscrupulous, and dissatisfied. It was in Germany that “the pagan gods of the Nibelungen are forging their deadly weapons,” for Germans believe national superiority is due to military superiority. Dr. Sarolea named as a war year this very year[2] in which we now are when he said:
“Believing, as they do, that to-day they are rich and prosperous mainly because in 1870 they beat the French people, why should they not believe and trust that in 1915 they would become even stronger and richer if they succeeded in beating the English?”
And the conflict, when it comes, will be “a political and religious crusade,” rather than a mere economic war, for the conflict between England and Germany “is the old conflict between liberalism and despotism, between industrialism and militarism, between progress and reaction, between the masses and the classes.”
So many other important points are made in Dr. Sarolea’s closely written book, in which practically every sentence contains a fact, an idea, or a prophecy, that it is not possible in this review to do more than present a few of them in the summary which follows. Though the present tense is used by Dr. Sarolea and the reviewer, it should be constantly remembered that Dr. Sarolea was thinking in 1912, not since August, 1914.