German sources. That there were many splendid Catholics in Germany was of course true. They were strong enough in numbers and organisation to have done something finer than throw themselves into the arms of Prussianism. The failure of the Centre Party in that regard will lie as a heavy cloud on its future. But that German Catholics should have lent themselves, as they did, to a systematic denigration of France in foreign periodicals was contemptible. The truth is that every German in the modern period has become infected with the superstition that he belongs to the chosen race. Matthew Arnold—who, for the rest, did not himself believe very luminously in God—started in these countries the notion that the war of 1870 was, as he called it, the judgment of Judæa on Greece. That a Protestant God should have thus judged a country whose old title was that of "eldest daughter of the Church," was an interpretation of events peculiarly agreeable to militant Protestants both in England and Germany. But that Catholics should have assimilated such a view was remarkable. It is true that French policy played disastrously into the hands of Bismarck. Gambetta's error of anti-clericalism led from disintegration to disintegration. Bismarck has left on record statements of his reasons for embarking on the Kulturkampf, which for frigid wickedness of purpose cannot be equalled in political literature.
"The laurels of Sadowa and Sedan do not satisfy
