points, and we shall be wise if we act on the assumption that his kind will breed true to its type. However great the defeat which in the end we may have inflicted on our chief enemy, we should only be cheapening our own achievement if we did not recognise in the North German one of the three or four most virile races of mankind.
Even with revolution in Germany let us not be toe sure in regard to its ultimate effect. The German revolutions of 1848 were almost comic in their futility. Since Bismarck there has only been one German Chancellor with political insight, and he—Von Bülow—has declared in his book on Imperial Germany that 'the German has always accomplished his greatest works under strong, steady, and firm guidance.' The end of the present disorder may only be a new ruthless organisation, and ruthless organisers do not stop when they have attained the objects which they at first set before them.
It will be replied, of course, that though Prussian mentality remain unchanged, and though a really stable Prussian Democracy be slow in its development, yet that Germany will, in any case, be so impoverished that she cannot do harm for the better part of a century to come. Is there not, however, in that
