Thought and learning, art and music, may bear certain characteristics of the country in which they are begotten; but they are also the products of humanity itself, or they would make no appeal to the world at large. The monuments of the German mind are no more robbed of their intellectual value by the national crime of this war than German mountains are robbed of their natural grandeur, German forests of their solemnity, or German rivers of their width and volume.
Any other attitude is extremely likely to degenerate into a petty jealousy that is bred of fear. This is how Mr. H. G. Wells wrote of our attitude towards Germany years ago:
We in Great Britain are now intensely jealous of Germany. We are intensely jealous of Germany, not only because the Germans outnumber us, and have a much larger and more diversified country than ours, and lie in the very heart and body of Europe, but because in the last hundred years, while we have fed on platitudes and vanity, they have had the energy and humility to develop a splendid system of national education, to toil at science and art and literature, to develop social organisation, to master and better our methods of business and industry, and to clamber above us in the scale of civilisation. This has humiliated and irritated rather than chastened us.
Such jealousy is a strangely short-sighted mistake. No valuable or lasting peace will come till jealousy is exorcised. There are ominous signs of the possible triumph of a deadly Saxon insularity, but there are other signs that give us hope. When so ardent a combatant as Mr. Lloyd George can speak well of the services of Germany to the world, all is not lost. It is pleasant to be able to quote these passages from an interview reported in the _Daily News_ of January 25, 1916:
“Mr. Lloyd George is not among those who imagine they are doing their country a service by decrying everything German. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that America and all of us should realise that there were two Germanies before the war. On the one hand, there was the industrial, the commercial, and the intellectual Germany, and in a most remarkable way she had blended the three elements. That Germany was rendering a great service to civilisation. It was conquering the world by the success of its methods and of its example, and that conquest would have proved a very genuine blessing. It would have been the means of saving some of the terrible waste from which most of the social evils of humanity spring. As an ardent social reformer, I freely confess that I myself was learning a good deal from that side of Germany, particularly in the direction of municipal and national organisation.’” Mr. Lloyd George goes on to say that the other Germany, the military Germany, had overthrown the Germany from which he had drawn inspiration. Our task then surely is to help to reduce military dominance everywhere and to help to set free that Germany whose peaceful conquest of the world “would have proved a very genuine blessing.”