k of it.
We would speedily dispatch a blood-thirsty butcher, like your Lord
Kitchener, from our island to our most unhealthy colony. We could not
even reconcile our worthy Dr. Karl Peters, who had dealt a little
unscrupulously with a few negro women, with our conceptions of culture,
and had to pass him over to you! But the thought shall not come to me or
to us, as it does to your Prime Ministers, to pose as angels of light, a
fact about which you have yourself told your compatriots the bitter
truth to our great joy. We admit having injured Belgium's neutrality,
but we have only done it because of dire necessity, because we could not
otherwise reach France and take up the fight against two sides forced
upon us. Belgium's independence and freedom, which is suddenly of the
utmost importance to your King and your Ministers, we have not touched.
Even after the expeditious capture of Liege we asked Belgium for the
second time: "Let us pass quickly through your country. We will make
good every damage, and will not take away a square foot 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
nu