While forty million English people have thus been spending their lives
self-centred, content to make their living, to enjoy life, and to behave
kindly to their fellows, there has grown up in Germany a nation, a
people of sixty millions, who believe that they belong together, that
their country has the first call on them, whose children go to school
because the Government that represents the nation bids them, who go for
two years to the army or the navy to learn war, because they know that
if the nation has to fight it can do so only by their fighting for it.
Their Government thinks it is its business to be always improving the
organisation of its sixty millions for security, for knowledge, for
instruction, for agriculture, for industry, for navigation. Thus after
forty years of common effort for a common good Germany finds itself the
first nation in Europe, more than holding its own in every department of
life, and eagerly surveying the world in search of opportunities.
The Englishman, while he has been living his own life and, as I think,
improving in many respects, has at the same time been admiring the
British Empire, and discovering with pride that a number of new nations
have grown up in distant places, formed of people whose fathers or
grandfathers emigrated from Great Britain.
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