Dr. Charles Eliot, President Emeritus of Harvard Uni- versity, has
written to the New York Times a most able letter on "The Sources and the Outcome of the European War." He finds the prime cause of the catastrophe, as all sane men must, in Germany's " desire for world-empire," supported by what he terms " the religion of valour and worship of a mystical conception of the State." That is a wonderfully concise definition of the bed-rock of the German horror. We see a nation rendered mad by dwelling too much on abstractions. As Mme. de Sta.& said : " Thought which calms other peoples inflames the minds of the Germans." For example, the very simple lawyer-like working hypothesis that State sovereignty is a thing absolute and illimitable went straight to the head of Treitschke like new wine, and made him hold that the State could do no wrong, and that anything and everything, no matter how great a violation of human rights were involved, might be done in the name of the safety of the State. Again, the plea of necessity in war has turned many German military writers—naturally, we do not doubt, humane men—into fiends. How much better is the stupid Englishman who cannot quite understand these abstractions, or who, at any rate, when they are about to involve him in an atrocity scratches his head and says " It can't be right to push the thing quite as far as that !"
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