I do, when foreigners praise his country for all the wrong reasons.  The Prussian will allow you to praise him for any reasons, for any length of time, for any eternity of folly; he is there to be praised.  Probably he is proud of this; probably he thinks he has a good digestion, because the poison of praise does not make him sick.  He thinks the absence of such doubt, or self-knowledge, makes for composure, grandeur, a colossal calm, a superior race—­in short, the whole claim of the Teutons to be the highest spiritual product of Nature and Evolution.  But as I have noticed a calm unity even more complete, not only in dogs and negroes, but in slugs, slow-worms, mangoldwurzels, moss, mud and bits of stone, I am a sceptic about this test for the marshalling in rank of all the children of God.  Now I point this out to you here for a very practical reason.  The Prussian will never understand revolutions—­which are generally reactions.  He regards them, not only with dislike, but with a mysterious kind of pity.  Throughout his confused popular histories, there runs a strange suggestion that civic populations have failed hitherto, and failed because they were always fighting.  The population of Berlin does not fight, or can’t; and therefore Berlin will succeed where Greece and Rome have failed.  Hitherto it is plain enough that Berlin has succeeded in nothing except in bad copies of Greece and Rome; and Prussians would be wiser to discuss the details of the Greek and Roman past, which we can follow, rather than the details of their own future, about which we are naturally not so well informed.  Well, every dome they build, every pillar they put upright, every pedestal for epitaph or panel for decoration, every type of church, Catholic or Protestant, every kind of street, large or small, they have copied from the old Pagan or Catholic cities; and those cities, when they made those things, were boiling with revolutions.  I remember a German professor saying to me, “I should have no scruple about extinguishing such republics as Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua; they are perpetually rioting for one thing or another.”  I said I supposed he would have had no scruple in extinguishing Athens, Rome, Florence and Paris; for they were always rioting for one thing or another.  His reply indicated, I thought, that he felt about Caesar or Rienzi very much as the Scotch Presbyterian Minister felt about Christ, when he was reminded of the corn-plucking on the Sabbath, and said, “Weel, I dinna think the better of him.”  In other words he was quite positive, like all his countrymen, that he could impose a sort of Pax Germanica, which would satisfy all the needs of order and of freedom forever; leaving no need for revolutions or reactions.  I am myself of a different opinion.  When I was a child, when the toy-trade of Germany had begun to flood this country, there was a priggish British couplet, engraven on the minds of governesses, which ran—­

    What the German children delight to make
    The English children delight to break.