It must also be admitted that
the conduct of the menaced Governments carried with it no suggestion of
resistance. It was no doubt, the effect of neither courage nor fear, but
of that prudence which causes the average man to stand very still in the
presence of a savage dog. It was not a very politic attitude, and the
more reprehensible in so far that it seemed to arise from the mistrust of
their own people's fortitude. On simple matters of life and death a
people is always better than its leaders, because a people cannot argue
itself as a whole into a sophisticated state of mind out of deference for
a mere doctrine or from an exaggerated sense of its own cleverness. I am
speaking now of democracies whose chiefs resemble the tyrant of Syracuse
in this, that their power is unlimited (for who can limit the will of a
voting people?) and who always see the domestic sword hanging by a hair
above their heads.
Perhaps a different attitude would have checked German self-confidence,
and her overgrown militarism would have died from the excess of its own
strength. What would have been then the moral state of Europe it is
difficult to say.
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