[Illustration: “My son, go and fight for your Motherland!”]
The bubble is very nicely balanced, for German “kultur,” which is in
reality but another word for “system” or “organisation,” rather than
that which English-speaking people understand by “culture,” has built
up a system of internal credit that shall ensure the correct balance
of the bubble--for just as long as the militarist policy of Germany
can endure the strain of war. But money alone is not sufficient for
victory; the peasant hard put to it to suppress his laugh, and the
crowned Germania that built up the paper pedestal of the bubble,
needed many other things to make that pedestal secure; there was
needed integrity, and the respect of neighbouring nations, and the
understanding of other points of view beside the doctrine of force, and
liberty instead of coercion of a whole nation, and many other things
that the older civilisations of Europe have accepted as parts of their
code of life--the things this new, upstart Germany has not had time to
learn. Thus, with the paper credit--and even with the gold reserve of
which Germany has boasted, the pedestal is but paper. And the winds
that blow from the flooded, corpse-strewn districts of the Yser, from
Artois, from Champagne and the Vosges hills and forests, and from the
long, long line of Russia’s grim defences--these winds shall blow it
away, leaving a nation bankrupt not only in money, but in the power to
coerce, in the power to inspire fear, and in all those things out of
which the Hohenzollern dynasty has built up the last empire of force.