The bubble is very nicely balanced, for German "kultur," which is in
reality but another word for "system" or "organization," 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 civilizations 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.