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Sarolea’s closely written book, in which practically every sentence contains a fact, an idea, or a prophecy, that it is not possible in this review to do more than present a few of them in the summary which follows. Though the present tense is used by Dr. Sarolea and the reviewer, it should be constantly remembered that Dr. Sarolea was thinking in 1912, not since August, 1914.
His vision was set out in “The Anglo-German Problem,” written in 1912, now published in an authorized American edition, perhaps the most accurate forecast which has been penned of to-day’s conflict, and certainly one of the most exact analyses of the German nation made before the world learned, since last August, to know it as it is—as Sarolea, master delineator of a nation’s character, drew it.
Bart Kennedy, or the late Emil Reich. But there is a distinction to be made. Few even of these, with the admirable and indeed almost magical exception of Dr. Sarolea, saw Germany as she was; occupied mainly with Europe and only incidentally with England; indeed, in the first stages, not occupied with England at all. Even the Anti-Germans were too insular.
As the bag of the net came towards the hard sand the silver fish showed; very few I thought for all the trouble and hands employed; not more than twenty lbs. weight I'd think, all silvery and sky blue and emerald green; bream and sand-launces and silver fish like whitebait and herring, all fresh and shining from the beautiful sea mint the colour beyond words green breakers, white surf, blue swell beyond, and brown figures with red and variously coloured turbans; young and old, all with such deep shadows on the sand, a scene Sarolea, the Spaniard, might make a show of painting.
Sarolea, looking at Germany from the British Isles, where he was writing, perceived that “war is actually unavoidable” unless a spiritual miracle was wrought; that Europe was “drifting slowly but steadily toward an awful catastrophe.” Why? Because Germany was strong, envious, ambitious, conceited, arrogant, unscrupulous, and dissatisfied.
Sarolea closes his book thus: “We can only hope that England, which to-day more than any other country—more, even, than republican France—represents the ideals of a pacific and industrial democracy, may never be called upon to assert her supremacy in armed conflict, and to safeguard those ideals against a wanton attack on the part of the most formidable and most systematic military power the world has ever seen.”
It was in Germany that “the pagan gods of the Nibelungen are forging their deadly weapons,” for Germans believe national superiority is due to military superiority. Dr. Sarolea named as a war year this very year in which we now are when he said: 1915.
The seer who thus saw is Dr. Charles Sarolea, who recently came to the United States in the interests of his country, one of the most distinguished of Belgian scholars, a friend of King Albert, holder of Belgian decorations and honours from British learned societies, for the last fourteen years Belgian Consul in Edinburgh, and for the last twenty-one years head of the French and Romance Department at the University of Edinburgh.
But this practically means only that the prisoner's cell has become the madman's cell: that it is scrawled all over inside with stars and systems, so that it looks like eternity. This is the contradiction remarked by Dr. Sarolea, in his brilliant book, between the wildness of German theory and the tameness of German practice.
SAUNDERS. The Last of the Huns. 1914. HENRI LICHTENBERGER. Germany and its Evolution in Modern Times. 1913. W.H. DAWSON. The Evolution of Modern Germany. 1908. C. TOWER. Germany of To-day. 1913. Home University Library. C. SAROLEA. The Anglo-German Problem. Board of Education Special Reports, vols. iii. and ix. M.E. Sadler on German Education. Memoirs of Prince Hohenlohe. Germany.
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