which a rather used-up English gentleman might sell a coronet when he
could not sell a fortress; might lower the public standards and yet
refuse to lower the flag. In short, the Germans are quite sure that they
understand us entirely because they do not understand us at all.
Possibly, if they began to understand us they might hate us even more,
but I would rather be hated for some small but real reason than pursued
with love on account of all kinds of qualities which I do not possess
and which I do not desire. And when the Germans get their first genuine
glimpses of what modern England is like they will discover that England
has a very broken, belated, and inadequate sense of having an obligation
to Europe; but no sort of sense whatever of having any obligation to
Teutonism.

*Slippery Strength of Stupidity.*

This is the last and strongest of the Prussian qualities we have here
considered. There is in stupidity of this sort a strange, slippery
strength, because it can be not only outside rules, but outside reason.
The man who really cannot see that he is contradicting himself has a
great advantage in controversy, though the advantage breaks down when he
tries to reduce it to simple addition, to chess--or to the game called
war. It is the same about the stupidity of the one-sided kinship. The
drunkard who is quite certain that a total stranger is his long-lost
brother has a great advantage until it comes to matters of detail. "We
must have chaos within," said Nietzsche, "that we may give birth to a
dancing star."

In these slight notes I have suggested the principal strong points of
the Prussian character--a failure in honor which almost amounts to a
failure in memory; an egomania that is honestly blind to the fact that
the other party is an ego, and, above all, an actual itch for tyranny
and interference, the devil which everywhere torments the idle and the
proud. To these must be added a certain mental shapelessness, which can
expand or contract without reference to reason or record--a potential
infinity of excuses. If the English had been on the German side the
German professors would have noted what irresistible energies had
evolved the Teutons. As the English are on the other side, the German
professors will say that these Teutons were not sufficiently evolved; or
they will say they were just sufficiently evolved to show that they were
not Teutons. Probably they will say both. But the truth is that all that
t