t office for another five centuries or so.... This is her
_first_ lesson poor France is getting. It is probable she will
require many such.

This is blasphemy indeed at the present time. Charles Kingsley was no
less emphatic in his admiration of Germany. Writing on the
Franco-Prussian War to Professor Max Mueller, he said:

Accept my loving congratulations, my dear Max, to you and your
people. The day which dear Bunsen used to pray, with tears in his
eyes, might not come till the German people were ready, has come,
and the German people are ready. Verily God is just and rules
too; whatever the Press may think to the contrary. My only fear
is lest the Germans should think of Paris, which cannot concern
them, and turn their eyes away from that which does concern
them, the retaking of Alsace (which is their own), and leaving
the Frenchman no foot of the Rhine-bank. To make the Rhine a word
not to be mentioned by the French henceforth ought to be the one
object of wise Germans, and that alone.... I am full of delight
and hope for Germany.

And to Sir Charles Bunbury:

I confess to you that were I a German I should feel it my duty to
my country to send my last son, my last shilling, and after all
my own self, to the war, to get that done which must be done,
done so that it will never need doing again. I trust that I
should be able to put vengeance out of my heart, to forget all
that Germany has suffered for two hundred years past from that
vain, greedy, restless nation, all even which she suffered, women
as well as men, in the late French war.

The attraction of Germany is not only paramount in literature, in Walter
Scott and Mill and Matthew Arnold; the superiority of German blood and
constitution was an article of faith of the Victorians. The sins of
Prussia were forgiven with amazing alacrity. The base attacks on Austria
and Denmark evoked no moral indignation. German influence on English
life was not only welcomed; historians went so far as to proclaim the
identity of England and Germany. Thus Freeman, in a lecture in 1872,
stated that "what is Teutonic in us is not merely one element among
others, but that it is the very life and essence of our national
being...." Houston Chamberlain, in his reverent unravelling of the
greatness of the Germanic peoples, is merely carrying on the tradition
of the Victorian age. In the applicatio