power; and this wild spirit whirled us into the mad course of respecting a treaty we had signed.  They can find in us no treason except that we keep our treaties:  failing to do this I call failing in controversy.  They have failed in popular persuasion.  They have had a very good opportunity.  The British Empire does contain many people who have been badly treated in various ways:  the Irish, the Boers; nay, the Americans themselves, whose national existence began with being badly treated.  With these the Prussians have done comparatively little; and with Europeans of your sort nothing.  They have never once really sympathised with the feeling of a Switzer for Switzerland; the feeling of a Norwegian for Norway; the feeling of a Tuscan for Tuscany.  Even when nations are neutral, Prussia can hardly bear them to be patriotic.  Even when they are courting every one else they can praise no one but themselves.  They fail in diplomacy, they fail in debate, they fail even in demagogy.  They have stupid plots, stupid explanations, and even stupid apologies.  But there is one thing they really do not fail in.  They do not fail in finding people stupid enough to carry them out.

Now, it is this question I would ask you to consider; you, as a good middle type of the Latins, a Liberal but a Catholic, an artist but a soldier.  The danger to the whole civilisation of which Rome was the fountain lies in this.  That the more this strange Pruss people fail in all the other things, the more they will fall back on this mere fact of a brutal obedience.  They will give orders; they have nothing else to give.  I say that this is the question for you; I do not say, I do not dream of saying, that the answer is for me.  It is for you to weigh the chance that their very failures in the arts of peace will drive them back upon the arts of war.  They could not, and they did not, dupe your people in diplomacy.  They did the most undiplomatic thing that can be done; they concealed a breach of partnership without even concealing the concealment.  They instigated the intrigue in Austria in such a way that Italy could honestly claim all the freedom of past ignorance, combined with all the disillusionment of present knowledge.  They so ran the Triple Alliance that they had to admit your grievance, at the very moment when they claimed your aid.  The English are stupider and less sensitive than you are; but even the English found the German Chancellor’s diplomacy not insinuating but simply insulting; I swear I would be a better diplomatist myself.  In the same way, there is no danger of people like you being corrupted in controversy.  There is no fear that the professors who pullulate all over the Baltic Plain will overcome the Latins in logic.  Some of them even claim to be super-logical; and say they are too big for syllogisms; generally having found even one syllogism too big for them.  If they complain either of your abstention from their cause or your adhesion to any other, you have an unanswerable answer.