to the lust for money." The particular Lutheran of whom I am speaking had been the guest of an English Nonconformist minister and his wife, who had evidently tried to be as hospitable as possible, and had no doubt put themselves out to take him for excursions and outings in the Shakespeare country.

"It was nothing but eating and drinking and sightseeing," remarked the Herr Pastor.

I suggested that he was a guest, to be looked after.

"I can assure you," he replied, "that Mr. ——— had nothing to do all day but read the newspapers, and drink tea with his congregation. He did not take the trouble to grow his own vegetables, and all he had to do was to preach on Sundays and attend a very unruly Sunday school. His wife, too, was not dressed as one of ours."

He explained to me that his own life was very different. He eked out his minute salary by a small scientifically managed farm, and I gathered the impression that he was much more of a farmer than a pastor, for he deplored his inability to obtain imported nitrates owing to the blockade. The only question on which he was at all unorthodox was that of the Junkers and their regrettable power of holding potatoes, pigs, and other supplies while small men like him had been obliged to sell. He had a good collection of modern scientific agricultural works, of which the Germans have an abundance.

But while admiring the energy of the great capitalists and the rational Liberal Party, the average clergyman tends towards sympathy with the Agrarians. The pastor of the small towns and villages, who is very much under the thumb of the local Junker or rich manufacturer, has as his highest ambition the hope that he and his wife may be invited to coffee at least twice a year. The pastor's wife is delighted to be condescendingly received by the great lady. Herr Pastor talks agriculture with Herr Baron, and Frau Pastor discusses past and coming incidents in the local birth rate with Frau Baron. Snobbery has no greater exemplification than in the relations of the local Lutheran pastor and the local landlord or millionaire.

A sidelight on German mentality is contained in a little conversation which I had with a clergyman in the Province of Posen. He knew England well, by residence and by matrimonial connections.

This is how he explained the battle of the Somme. I give his own words:—

"Many wounded men are coming back to our Church from the dreadful Western front. They have been fighting the British, and they find that so ignorant are the British of warfare that the British soldiers on the Somme refuse to surrender, not knowing that they are really beaten, with the result that terrible losses are inflicted upon our brave troops."

In this exact report of a conversation is summed up a great deal of
German psychology.

For the Salvation Army a number of Germans have genuine respect,
because it seems to be organised on some military basis. The
Church of England they consider as degenerate as the Nonconformist.
Both, they think, are mere refuges for money-making ecclesiastics.

CHAPTER V

PUPPET PROFESSORS

The professor, like the army officer, has long been a semi-deity in Germany. Not only in his university lectures does he influence the students, and particularly the prospective teachers of secondary schools who hang on his words, but he writes the bulk of the historical, economic and political literature of the daily Press, the magazines and the tons of pamphlets which flood the country.

Years before the war the Government corralled him for its own. It gave him social status, in return for which he would do his part to make the citizen an unquestioning, faithful and obedient servant of the State. As soon as he enters on his duties he becomes a civil servant, since the universities are State institutions. He takes an oath in which it is stipulated that he will not write or preach or do anything questioning the ways of the State. His only way to make progress in life, then, is to serve the State, to preach what it wishes preached, to teach history as it wishes history taught.

The history of Prussia is the history of the House of Hohenzollern, and the members of the House, generation after generation, must all be portrayed a& heroes. There was a striking illustration of this in 1913 when the Kaiser had Hauptmann's historical play suppressed because it represented Frederick William III. in true light, as putty in the hands of Napoleon.

There is a small group of German professors interested solely in scientific research, such as Professor Roentgen and the late Professor Ehrlich, which we exclude from the "puppet professors." Such men succeed through sheer ability and their results are their diplomas before the world. Neither shoulder-knots nor medals pinned in rows across their breasts would contribute one iota to their success, nor make that success the more glittering once it is achieved.

One of these, a Bavarian of the old school, a thoughtful, liberal man who had travelled widely, told me that he deplored the depths of mental slavery to which the mass of the German professors had sunk. "They are living on the reputation made by us scientists," he declared. "They write volumes and they go about preaching through the land, but they contribute nothing, absolutely nothing, to the uplifting of humanity and of the country." He told me of how Government spies before the war and during it watch professors who are suspected of having independent ways of thought, and for the slightest "offence" such as being in the audience of a Social Democratic lecture (this before the war, of course; such meetings are forbidden now) they are put on the official black-list and promotion is closed to them for ever.

In warring Germany I found professors vying with one another to sow hatred among the people, to show that Germany is always right, and that she is fighting a war of defence, which she tried to avoid by every means in her power, and that any methods employed to crush Great Britain, the real instigator of the attack on Germany, are good methods.

With the pastors, they spread the idea that "Germany is the rock
selected by Almighty God upon which to build His Empire." J. P.
Bang, the able Danish Professor of Theology at the University of
Copenhagen, writes clearly on this point. He says, when describing
Emanuel Geibel:—

"He has succeeded in finding the classical formula for the German arrogance, which of necessity demands that Germanism shall be placed above everything else in the world, and at the same time in giving this arrogance such an expression that it shall not conflict with the German demand for moral justification. This has been achieved in the lines which have been quoted times without number in the newest German war literature:

  Und es mag am deutschen Wesen
  Einmal noch die Welt genesen!
  (The world may yet again be healed by Germanism.)

"The hope here expressed has become a certainty for modern Germany, and the Germans see in this the moral basis for all their demands. Why must Germany be victorious, why must she have her place in the sun, why must her frontiers be extended, why is all opposition to Germany shameful, not to say devilish, why must Germany become a world-empire, why ought Germany and not Great Britain to become the great Colonial Power? Why, because it is through the medium of Germanism that the world is to be healed; it is upon Germanism that the salvation of the world depends. That is why all attacks against Germanism are against God's plans, in opposition to His designs for the world; in short,