I speak as one who has seen the spirit of the Prussian governing class
at work from close by, having at its disposal and using to the full
practically every agency for moulding the public mind.

I have watched it proceed with relentless persistency and profound
cunning to instil into the nation the demoniacal obsession of
power-worship and world-dominion, to modify and pervert the
mentality--indeed the very fibre and moral substance--of the German
people, a people which until misled, corrupted and systematically
poisoned by the Prussian ruling caste, was and deserved to be an
honoured, valued and welcome member of the family of nations.

I have hated that spirit ever since it came within my ken many years
ago; hated it all the more as I saw it ruthlessly pulling down a
thing which was dear to me--the old Germany to which I was linked by
ties of blood, by fond memories and cherished sentiments.

The difference in the degree of guilt as between the German people and
their Prussian or Prussianized rulers and leaders for the monstrous
crime of this war and the atrocious barbarism of its conduct is the
difference between the man who, acting under the influence of a
poisonous drug, runs amuck in mad frenzy and the unspeakable
malefactor who administered that drug, well knowing and fully
intending the ghastly consequences which were bound to follow.

The world fervently longs for peace. But there can be no peace
answering to the true meaning of the word--no peace permitting the
nations of the earth, great and small, to walk unarmed and
unafraid--until the teaching and the leadership of the apostles of an
outlaw creed shall have become discredited and hateful in the sight
of the German people; until that people shall have awakened to a
consciousness of the unfathomable guilt of those whom they have
followed into calamity and shame; until a mood of penitence and of a
decent respect for the opinions of mankind shall have supplanted the
sway of what President Wilson has so trenchantly termed "truculence
and treachery."

God strengthen the conscience and the understanding, the will and the
power of the German people so that they may find the only way which
will give to the world an early peace, the only road which, in time,
will lead Germany back into the family of nations from which it is now
an outcast.

From each successive visit to Germany for twenty-five years I came
away more appalled by the sinister transmutatio