I think a nation is never so good as when it is national and never so bad as when it is international. XXXiv

Statesman

I am, in this very practical sense,entirely for trusting the government… It is this—that we are not trusting them as extraordinary men, but as ordinary men. Strength is the great weakness of politicians. They are haunted by the decayed Carlylean fancy that a nation in peril must be saved by a Great Man; and each of them is always trying to prove that he was the Great Man and all his colleagues were impiously blind to the fact. They are wrong from the very root. A great nation in peril is saved by a great nation, or else it is not saved at all. Napoleon could have done nothing without Revolutionary France. Finding a Napoleon is a strength; but looking for a Napoleon is invariably a weakness. General Joffre, in an anecdote which may not be true, but which would be very creditable to his strong humour and sense, is reported as having said that Napoleon “would probably have thought of something.” This is true; it is also useless. Merely trying to think of something leads to thinking of anything. We see it in the sterile violence of the new schools of art, which say “I am going to do something original,” when they have not thought of anything to do. Here is the great snare for the statesmen. And we, who are supporting their sane authority against sedition and panic, must warn them against this great temptation. They must be cured of being strong men. They must be saved from saving the State. Serving the State is all that is asked of them, and this they are quite competent to do. 327

Risking Your Life

The causes which will or will not make a man risk his life are necessarily quite different in kind from those that will make him risk any pleasure that depends on his life. You can only bribe him to die with certain things, and not others. And one of the things with which you can bribe him can be most shortly described as a brass band. He will cheerfully die in an atmosphere of triumph--nay, he will even cheerfully be defeated in an atmosphere of trump. But he will not do the same things in an atmosphere of defeat. This romance is the most real of all the realities of war. Its necessity is as practical as that of petrol for motors or food for men. It is proved by experiment in the fact that successes have often been gained through the presence of some commander even when he did not command, or that under a certain degree of failure in the whole body the moral breaks and there is rout...Men will only accept such tragedy if they may treat it as comedy. It is necessary, I say, to dwell for a moment on this fact, lest anyone should still suppose that in recruitment one can make progress by pessimism. The men are not needed because of our defeats. The are needed for our victory 320

More Prussia

The Germans believe that the Prussians, who have conquered them, can conquer anybody. They have no fear of external danger for the same reason that they have no hope of internal revolt.We cannot rescue the German from the Prussian until we can rescue him from the fear of the Prussian. In other words, we are at war with a legend---or to put it more correctly, a spell. Now, it is characteristic of all such spells that they cling on as long as there is any sort of doubt; and half-defeats of them are no defeats at all.

Prussian Peace

The question of an inconclusive peace, which shall leave an unrepentant Prussia at the head of an undefeated German race, is now for the first time seriously brought before us. I would ask the reader to regard it in the light of the following considerations. We must first dismiss from our minds altogether a very current notion of making a treaty with the men of Germany. We might as well talk about making a treaty with the horses of Germany. We are dealing with the ambitious and audacious Prussian Monarchy, which has pursued one policy for two centuries. Why the large, blond, bulky, handsome cart-horse of Germany allows itself to be ridden by this beggar on horseback ---or rather, burglar on horseback ---we do not know. But we do know that its subordination is subordination and nothing else: that it is no case of one nation being deputed to represent a race. We do know, for a fact, that Germany no more dreams of directing Prussia than a horse rides on a man. It is not merely that the King of Prussia does not definitely claim to represent the Germans. The King of Prussia definitely refused to represent the Germans. And he refused upon the positive ground that he did not want to represent them because he did want to rule them.

German Mind

For the mass which is the German mind is not convinced of God. And Germans hold, with excellent reason, of the absence of God. And Germans hold, with excellent reason, that the absence of God would be very much on their side. As for the German Emperor, he is neither a diabolist nor a divine-righter. He is a journalist. His deity is the cliche, and not a creed. One of his cliches, for instance, was that the Germans are “the salt of the earth,” evidently used in the bulgar, unthinking sense of the staple or substance---that is, the meat of the earth. But salt is not a piece de resistance. It is a corrective. It is the priest, not the man. The meaning of salt is that there exists something which we cannot live on, but cannot live without.

Choosing Chimneys

English chimneys are swept when the householder chooses, and German chimneys when the town council chooses. xxx277