First, says Dr. Sarolea, there are the bitter memories of the Franco-Prussian conflict of 1870, in which the conqueror hurled against the conquered a pitiless "Woe to the vanquished!" and in democratic age chose to dispose of the destinies of millions of French people without their concent, treating the Alsatians and Lorrainers as if they were so many pawns in a grim game of cheas—eo many slaves to be forcibly transferred from one owner to another! Then there has been the commercial rivalry between the Germans and the English, two nations which until now have never fought each other, and between which there has been no historical quarrel. Yet the Briton has, in reality, long since ceased to underrate the splendid qualities of his outonic competitor, or to feel any unreasonable resentment because of his growing success In fact the frank recognition of German good qualities and the unstinted praise of German attainments have long been the burden of every British Consular report.
Two-thirds of the trade credited to Belgium' and Holland are really German transit trade. So that these two peoples have actually prospered through ite expansion. Yet in these countries, just as in Denmark and Switzerland, Germany has long been intensely unpopular fact which in each case finds much of its explanation in their dread of her political power—their terror at the possibility of being politically absorbed by her. Yet startling and widespread has been the international hostility against the Fatherland that the Germans themselves were wont to confess that all these causes put together were insufficient to ox-plain it, and were driven to imagine that the rest of the world must. have perversely entered into a wicked and malicious conspiracy against them.
Dr. Sarolea's own explanations are simpler and more credible. First, he says, the inherent qualities of the German race, and an extraordinary conjuncture of favourable circumstances, have raised them to a position of political power and commercial prosperity which have exceeded their wildest dreams. And this startling acosssion of wealth and position, after centuries of humiliation, have developed an inordinate degree of self-conceit and gelfassertion. In other words, the Germans, politically and economically, are the upstarts of Europe, and they suffer from the shortcomings which always characterize upstarts—vanity, vulgarity and aggressiveness. © These shortcomings reveal themselves in a crave
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.