For that and no
other is the true note of your _Welt-politik_ which desires to live.
The German eagle with a Prussian head looks all round the horizon, not so
much for something to do that would count for good in the records of the
earth, as simply for something good to get. He gazes upon the land and
upon the sea with the same covetous steadiness, for he has become of late
a maritime eagle, and has learned to box the compass. He gazes north and
south, and east and west, and is inclined to look intemperately upon the
waters of the Mediterranean when they are blue. The disappearance of the
Russian phantom has given a foreboding of unwonted freedom to the _Welt-
politik_. According to the national tendency this assumption of Imperial
impulses would run into the grotesque were it not for the spikes of the
_pickelhaubes_ peeping out grimly from behind. Germany's attitude proves
that no peace for the earth can be found in the expansion of material
interests which she seems to have adopted exclusively as her only aim,
ideal, and watchword. For the use of those who gaze half-unbelieving at
the passing away of the Russian phantom, part Ghoul, part Djinn, part Old
Man of the Sea, and wait half-doubting for the birth of a nation's soul
in this age which knows no miracles, the once-famous saying of poor
Gambetta, tribune of the people (who was simple and believed in the
"immanent justice of things"), may be adapted in the shape of a warning
that, so far as a future of liberty, concord, and justice is concerned:
"Le Prussianisme--voila l'ennemi!"
THE CRIME OF PARTITION--1919
At the end of the eighteenth century, when the partition of Poland had
become an accomplished fact, the world qualified it at once as a crime.
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