rise and influence of the commercial class. These two classes, acting
and reacting on each other, and pushing--though for different
reasons--in the same direction, are answerable, as far as Germany is
concerned, for dragging Europe into this trouble; and they must share
the blame.

If it is true, as already suggested, that Germany's action has only been
that of the spark that fires the magazine, still her part in the affair
affords such an extraordinarily illuminating text and illustration that
one may be excused for dwelling on it.

Here, in her case, we have the divisions of a nation's life set out in
well-marked fashion. We have a military clique headed by a personal and
sadly irresponsible ruler; we have a vulgar and much swollen commercial
class; and then, besides these two, we have a huge ant's nest of
professors and students, a large population of intelligent and
well-trained factory workers, and a vast residuum of peasants. Thus we
have at least five distinct classes, but of these the last three
have--till thirty or forty years ago--paid little or no attention to
political matters. The professors and students have had their noses
buried in their departmental science and _fach_ studies; the artisans
have been engrossed with their technical work, and have been only
gradually drifting away from their capitalist employers and into the
Socialist camp; and the peasants--as elsewhere over the world, absorbed
in their laborious and ever-necessary labours--have accepted their fate
and paid but little attention to what was going on over their heads.
Yet these three last-mentioned classes, forming the great bulk of the
nation, have been swept away, and suddenly at the last, into a huge
embroilment in which to begin with they had no interest or profit.