ABSTRACT
Since the outbreak of the war, the pamphlet literature in the countries of the Entente has been full of citations from German political writers. The jingoism of Germany has been peculiar both in its intensity and in its character. This special quality appears to be due both to the temperament and to the recent history of the German nation. In the Germany of the past, the Germany of small States, to which all non-Germans look back with such sympathy and such regret, their thinkers and poets were inspired by grandiose intellectual abstractions. The unification of Germany diverted all their interest from speculation about the universe, life and mankind to the material interests of their new country. Germany became the preoccupation of all Germans. German imperialism, while it involves the same intellectual presuppositions, the same confusions, the same erroneous arguments, and the same short-sighted ambitions, as the imperialism of other countries, exhibits them all in an extreme degree.
