Unfortunately, it is precisely this sort of actuality and fulfilment that makes it urgent that Europe should put forth her whole energy to drag down these antique demoniacs; these idiots filled with force as by fiends.  They will do things, as a maniac will, until he cannot do them.  To me it seemed that some things could not be said and done.  I thought a man would have been ashamed to bribe a new enemy like England to betray an old enemy like France.  I thought a man would have been ashamed to punish the pure self-defence of folk so offenceless as the Belgians.  These hopes must go from us, my friend.  There is only one thing of which the Prussian would be ashamed; and of that, we have sworn to God, he shall taste before the end.

* * * * *

My Dear ------

The Prussianised German, of whatever blend of races he may be, has one quality which may perhaps be racially simple; but which is, at any rate, very plain.  Chamberlain, the German philosopher or historian (I know not which to call him or how to call him either) remarks somewhere that purebred races possess fidelity; he instances the negro and the dog—­and, I suppose, the German.  Anyhow, it is true that there is a recognisable and real thing which might be called fidelity (or perhaps monotony) which exists in Germans in about the same style as in dogs and niggers.  The North Teuton really has in this respect the simplicities of the savage and the lower animals; that he has no reactions.  He does not laugh at himself.  He does not want to kick himself.  He does not, like most of us, repent—­or occasionally even repent of repenting.  He does not read his own works and find them much worse or much better than he had expected.  He does not feel a faint irrational sense of debauch, after even divine pleasures of this life.  Watch him at a German restaurant, and you will satisfy yourself that he does not.  In short, both in the most scientific and in the most casual sense of the word, he does not know what it is to have a temper.  He does not bend and fly back like steel; he sticks out, like wood.  In this he differs from any nation I have known, from your nation and mine, from the French, the Spanish, the Scotch, the Welsh and the Irish.  Bad luck never braces him as it does us.  Good luck never frightens him as it does us.  It can be seen in what the French call Chauvinism and we call Jingoism.  For us it is fireworks; for him it is daylight.  On Mafeking Night, celebrating a small but picturesque success against the Boers, nearly everybody in London came out waving little flags.  Nearly everybody in London is now heartily ashamed of it.  But it would never occur to the Prussians not to ride their high horses with the freshest insolence for the far-off victory of Sedan; though on that very anniversary the star of their fate had turned scornful in the sky, and Von Kluck was in retreat from Paris.  Above all, the Prussian does not feel annoyed, as