of your country!  Do destroyers of liberty and Huns and vandals, or whatever other defamatory names your English papers now heap upon us, who at the time of Beethoven and Schopenhauer formed the Areopagus of culture, conduct themselves in such a way?  Does not one of your living spirits in England cry aloud at the reprehensible alliance which your Government has made over your heads with Russia and Japan?  On the most shameful day in English history, on the day when Mongolian Japan gave the German people her ultimatum at the instigation of your politicians, on this, I repeat it, most shameful day in the entire English history, I believed that the great dead in Westminster Abbey would rise from their graves horrified at the shameful deed which their grandsons and great-grandsons imposed upon old England.

The Land of Shakespeare.

We Germans venerated the old England almost as a fatherland.  We have recognized, understood, and studied Shakespeare, whom you, Bernard Shaw, so dislike, more than any other people, even more than the English nation itself.  Lord Byron received more benefits from Goethe alone than from all of England put together.  Newton, Darwin, and Adam Smith found in Germany their best supporters and interpreters.  The dramatic writers of latter-day England, most worthy of mention, from Oscar Wilde to you, Galsworthy and Knoblauch, are recognized by us and their plays performed numberless times.  We have always endeavored to understand the English character.  “Nowhere did we feel so much at home as in Germany,” all your compatriots will tell you who have been guests here.

In “gratitude” for this our merchants were persecuted for years by your merchants, because of a wild hatred for Germans, which, by the way, had a most disagreeable effect upon the races of other colors.  In “gratitude,” with but few exceptions which we will not forget, we are now abused and belittled by your press before all of Europe and America as if we were assassins, vagabonds, enemies of culture and murderers, far worse than the Russians.  As thanks for that you have entered upon a war against us, for which even Sir Edward Grey could not at first give a good reason until the injury of Belgium neutrality luckily came to his assistance.

Our people are, therefore, now rightly embittered against England because through your groundless participation you have made more difficult the war against Russia and France, for which one alone, the Czar of Russia, bears the blame.  But despite this great bitterness they would never approve the demolition of your country and your nation, because of their respect for your great past and your share in the development of culture in Europe.  You, however, joined an alliance as a third great power, whose only purpose is our dissolution and destruction.  Merely for reasons of justice and of moral courage a Pitt, a Burke, a Disraeli would have withdrawn their participation in such an alliance,