No solemn engagement and no pious resolution has any weight in the balance against a cultural fatality of this magnitude.
* * * * * This account of the derivation and current state of German nationalism will of course appear biased to anyone who has been in the habit of rating German Culture high in all its bearings, and to whom at the same time the ideals of peace and liberty appeal.

Indeed, such a critic, gifted with the due modicum of asperity, might well be provoked to call it all a more or less ingenious diatribe of partisan malice.

But it can be so construed only by those who see the question at issue as a point of invidious distinction between this German animus on the one hand and the corresponding frame of mind of the neighboring peoples on the other hand.

There may also appear to the captious to be some air of deprecation about the characterisation here offered of the past history of political traffic within the confines of the Fatherland.

All of which, of course, touches neither the veracity of the characterisation nor the purpose with which so ungrateful a line of analysis and exposition has been entered upon.