1. The Political Thought of Heinrich von Treitschke. By H. W. C. Davis. London: Constable, 1914. 2. Politik.

By Heinrich von Treitschke. Translated by Blanche Dugdale and Torben de Bille. Two vols. London: Constable, 1915.

IN order that a book may deserve serious attention, many people suppose that it must possess some intrinsic merit. In respect of books, however, which express opinions and principles, this is by no means the case. Such books may be expositions of abject or flagrant fallacies, and yet deserve, for that very reason, not neglect but attention, if it happens that they are taken seriously by any large number of people, and have any marked effect on their corporate mood and actions. It cannot be said that Treitschke is a mere prophet of fallacies; but his chief claim to the serious attention of Englishmen is to be found in those parts of his writings which embody not truths, but errors; for it is these which, after his death, have made him what he has notoriously become the leader of everything in the national thought of Germany, by which the Germans have now distinguished themselves from all other civilised nations. In the political teachings of Treitschke, curiously blended with elements of a very different character, is to be found the intellectual apology for every savage doctrine which stains the pages of the German Military Handbook, for the repudiation of treaties as so many scraps of paper, for the sinking of the 'Lusitania,' for the mutilation of children, for the infection of a nation with the temper of an angry animal. An indictment of this kind must be made with proper discrimination, for else it would be a mere reproduction of the temper which it imputes to others. Those special parts of his teaching which represent the present content of the national temper of Germany must be carefully isolated from the rest, and examined on their own merits.

We welcome, therefore, the two works now before us, one of them being a complete translation of the series of political lectures which made Treitschke famous in

Berlin; the other being a selection, accompanied by comments and explanations, of salient passages from these and from other writings of the author-a selection which Mr Davis presents to the English reader, as showing what the peculiar elements in the philosophy of Treitschke are, the acceptance of which in Germany has been associated with such monstrous consequences. Mr Davis has performed his task with the acuteness of a trained thinker; and, allowance being made for a few verbal inaccuracies, the translation of Politik' by Mrs Dugdale and M. de Bille is in point of style admirable. It reads like the original composition of an accomplished English author.

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This translation derives an additional interest from the brilliant though brief introduction to it contributed by Mr Balfour. The urbane yet penetrating causticity of which, as a critic, Mr Balfour is a master, has never been more apparent than it is in these few pages. One of the happiest examples of this quality is to be found in his comment on Treitschke's extravagant laudation of Germany at the expense of other countries. In seeking to place Germany on a pedestal, his method, says Mr Balfour, 'is to lower his standards of comparison.' It may, he observes, 'be judicious to encourage the too diffident Prussians by assuring them that "they are by their character more reasonable and more free than Frenchmen;"' but, he proceeds, when the Prussian reader discovers that in Treitschke's opinion the French are the most unreasonable and least free people imaginable, the value of the tribute to Prussian excellence is marred. In a similar vein he criticises Treitschke's doctrines as to education and culture. There is no way, Treitschke declares, in which intellect and taste can be more successfully developed than by a thorough study of Greek and Latin'; but, after he has laid down this principle with regard to the masses of mankind, we are, says Mr Balfour, presently surprised by finding that, when he comes to deal with the education of a German prince, he declares that classical study is altogether unnecessary. 'He ought to learn French and English. What occasion has he to trouble his head with more?' 'Are then,' says Mr Balfour, intellect and taste of no value to a German Prince, or is he privileged without education to acquire Vol. 226.-No. 448.

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these gifts simply by the Grace of God?' Mr Balfour touches one point after another in the same spirit of light but carefully discriminating irony; but, as he is careful to point out, his own criticisms are intended, not to exhaust the subject, but merely to prepare the reader for the kind of reasoning which he will encounter in the philosopher's own pages. We will, therefore, now pass on to a more systematic examination of them, only observing by way of preface, that the errors of Treitschke's philosophy are even more profound than Mr Balfour's criticism might lead the reader to anticipate.

In reviewing the materials before us, including those put together by Mr Davis, we may set out with observing that everything in the political thought of Treitschke, which is peculiar or which forms a part of any coherent system, has for its end and centre his conception of what he calls The State; and that this conception, though it cannot be called original, is widely different from that of most modern thinkers-even from that which prevailed amongst the thinkers of Germany prior (we may roughly say) to the Franco-Prussian War. If modern political thought be contrasted with ancient and medieval, it will be found to differ from the latter in the fact that, instead of regarding society as created by, and existing for the State, it tends to regard the State as created by, and existing for, society. The forms in which thinkers have expressed this modern view have been various. The earliest of them have been in semblance historical, and have virtually consisted of assertions that at some unspecified period the citizens made a contract with some single or corporate governor, they on their part engaging to submit to his government, and he in return engaging to govern them in such a way that the advantages of so submitting to him shall at all events outweigh the drawbacks. Such assertions, though put forward as history, were at best nothing but allegories.

A great advance on this method of reasoning was made when the Utilitarians, content to take things as they were, represented the business of government as the manufacture of contemporary comfort. An advance more remarkable still, in which the study of the present and the study of the past were united, was made as the

result of those discoveries which illuminated the minds of men with the modern conception of evolution. They were discoveries which seemed at first sight to have nothing to do with politics. They seemed to culminate in the history of the human unit-of man as a species of animal connected with, but distinct from, others, and also as a completed organism, distinct from, but originating in, a single cell and embryo. Considered under both these aspects, man revealed himself as the result of a multiplication and a growing differentiation of parts, which ultimately so cohered as to form one corporate life. But thinkers, when once their attention had been quickened by these discoveries, were not slow to perceive that the history of man as an individual had many striking analogies in the phenomena of all human groups. Here also was an aggregation of parts; here also was a gradual differentiation of functions; here also these separate parts or organs ministered to the life of a corporately individual whole. In other words, to the thought of the modern world, all cohesive groups, no less than individuals, came to present themselves as so many separate organisms.

This view, in the days of Treitschke's early manhood, was no less prevalent in Germany than in England, France and America; and Treitschke's first exploit as a young political thinker was to refute it. The assumption, he said, that Society is a living organism, implies that the State is a mere mechanical structure which exists to protect Society; and that, while Society has unbounded claims on the allegiance of the individual, the State is only needed for definite and circumscribed objects, and has only to be obeyed in so far as the interests of Society demand such obedience.' Treitschke, on the contrary, maintained that Society and the State are co-equal, the State being, instead of a mechanical accessory, a something which is fashioned by Society out of the substance of its own life'out of the legal ideas, the moral ideas, and the economic conditions, of a people.' Of this argument Mr Davis very truly observes that it is virtually a mere repetition of that which it was intended to annihilate; for what are 'the legal and moral ideas of a people,' and what are their 'economic methods,' if they are not what sociologists mean by 'social conditions' or 'Society'? And that the

State is produced by Society is precisely what the sociologists say. The truth of the matter is that, when Treitschke, at the beginning of his career, attacked the sociological thinkers whose school was then in the ascendant, the real difference between his own ideas and theirs was present to him in the form of feeling rather than of clear thought; and the nature of these feelings is to be found in the circumstances of his early life.

Himself a Saxon brought up at the Court of Dresden, the political phenomena which first obtruded themselves on his notice were those presented by a Germany made up of numerous States, many of them open to ridicule on account of their small dimensions, all of them so disunited by petty and parochial jealousies that they could not combine for any great and common purpose with an effect even remotely proportionate to the sum of their respective populations. What, then, he asked himself, was the explanation of this paradox? Each of these States stood somehow for a certain Society; each of these Societies was a group of human beings similar to the rest in point of origin, of language and of racial sympathy. For what reason was their existence, if taken in the mass, so nugatory? And the first answer which shaped itself in his mind was this-that the reason lay, not in the character of these groups as Societies, but in the character which they assumed when they presented themselves to one another as States. Hence the State and Society were obviously different things. The one was not the natural and evolutionary equivalent of the other; and the Societies of Germany at all events-the Societies in which he was primarily interested-must hitherto have conducted their affairs without any true conception of what the nature of a State is, of what are its true functions, and of the means required for the fulfilment of them.

Such being his thought, or mood of thought in its first stage, its farther development began when, turning as he did from a narrow contemplation of Germany to a study of the detailed history of the great civilisations of the world, he elaborated the conclusion that, with certain marked exceptions, the true nature of the State had never been consciously understood, or realised as a fact, anywhere. One element or another, necessary to