ungary and Italy,
in a confused state of squabble with their neighbors; they are nervous
and disquieted by the financial and industrial conditions; they
condemn whole-heartedly the political caste system by which much of
the best material in Germany is barred from the councils and the
diplomatic and executive activities of the nation; there are not a few
who would welcome an inconclusive war that would, they think, put an
end to this system, and make the ruler and the officials responsible
to the people; they wish to open the doors of this governmental,
legislative, educational, industrial hot-house, and give the nation a
chance to grow naturally in the open air.

The policy of making other people afraid of you must have an end, the
policy of making others respect and like you can have no end. There is
no question which is the natural law of national development. Neither
for the individual nor for a nation is it wholesome to increase
antagonisms and to lessen the conciliatory points of contact with the
world.

Many of the weaknesses, much of the strength of Germany are
artificial. They have not grown, they have been forced. The very
barrenness of the soil, the ring of enemies, the soft moral and social
texture of the population, have, so their little knot of rulers think,
made necessary these harsh, artificial forcing methods.

The outstanding proof of the artificiality of this civilization is its
powerlessness to propagate. Germans transplanted from their hothouse
civilization to other countries cease to be Germans; and nowhere in
the world outside Germany is German civilization imitated, liked, or
adopted. The German is nonplussed to find the Pole in the East, the
Frenchman in the West, the Dane in the North, scoffing at his alte
Kultur, as he calls it, and he is irritated beyond measure by the
German from America, who returns to the Vaterland to criticise, to
sneer, and to thank God that he is an American, not a German citizen.
Germans become English citizens, no Englishmen become Germans;
millions of Germans have become Americans, no Americans become
Germans. No other population would be amenable to the Prussian methods
that have made Germany, nor is there anywhere in the world a people
demanding Prussian methods, while there are millions under the
Prussian yoke who hate it.

The German rhetoric to the effect that Germany is to save the world by
Teutonizing the world, is laughable. Prussia is the ventriloquist