vulgar ideas on
female chastity, enjoys the obscene, has no good words to say of
anyone beyond his boundaries.

Pray do not fancy I am pretending to chide _you_. Weren't we all
like you in America, dazzled before what apparently we were
humbly ready to admit as the super-race? And yet in a multitude
of ways it is so obviously a people set off by itself in much
barbarism. There is its Gothic script which offends the eye
somewhat like outlandish runes. Its very language growls and
snorts at you, sounds threatening as if angry--pardon me for
these sentences! There are its mud-colored towns and
architecture, its rude life, rough skinned, hairy, ferocious,
with tastelessness prevailing.

The German imagination is never shot through with clear, happy
sunshine. The German emotions are distinctively expressed by
thumpings in some form. The Teuton's inability to see himself as
another sees him--is this not, above all, the stamp of an
under-civilized people?...

* * * * *

_England, October, 1914._

... Do not think I am unduly harsh, prejudiced, revengeful. I am
trying to write in measured terms of what has been forced in
upon me and my attention against my wish or expectations.

I have met but one American who said that war was at hand and
knew what the Germans really are at home. He was an elderly
journalist in Dresden who was jeered at until he almost imagined
himself mentally unbalanced. Others thought him so, at any rate.

But Anderson was a true prophet. Dear isolated, desolated soul!
I wonder where he is now. I wonder if he got out safely. How I
wish I could grasp his hand and say, How wise were your
convictions!

Like myself he had gone to Deutschland to admire and love the
Germans. But he found what I found--an astonishing amount of
ruthlessness. How could one expect that the ultimate
world-justice and world-humanity were to evolve out of a race to
which the army, armed soldiers and statesmen clad in steel,
stand for so much?

How could anything of universal good come from a people who
consider nothing from the viewpoint of a kindly common
brotherhood? Contempt, intolerance, physical force, are what
they gloat over in international relations. I discovered that
when they must ask pardon or make amends, they do so with ba