Numerous facts easy to verify and in part recent permit us to
throw some light upon it and offer us a guarantee against hazardous
conjectures.
_Defining a caste as "a group of men bound to each other by solidarity
of functions in society," such as the Brahmins of India and the feudal
nobility, Prof. Millioud says that he will use the terms as equivalent
or nearly equivalent to a "directing class." Quoting the article from
Vorwaerts which led to the suspension of that Socialist organ and which
"admits by implication that responsibility for the war falls on
Germany," he proceeds to examine the origins of the influence of the war
party and the interests it served._
Here we must have recourse to history. In Germany the dominant class is
composed in part of an aristocracy by birth and of bourgeois
capitalists, more or less of them ennobled. The interior policy of
Germany since 1871 and even since 1866 is explained by the relations,
sometimes kindly, sometimes hostile, of these two categories of persons,
by the opposition or the conjunction of these two influences, and not
by a struggle of the dominant class against the socialistic mass. That
struggle, which is in France and is becoming in England a fact of
essential gravity, has been in Germany only a phenomenon of secondary
importance.
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