The Morning Post of Wednesday contains a most inter- esting
summary, forwarded by its Berlin correspondent, of an open letter, entitled "Against the Stream," by the dis- tinguished jurist Dr. von Stradonitz. A writer named Herr Dernburg having scouted the notion that there was any actual hatred of the British apart from resentment at their South African policy, Dr. von Stradonitz retorts with a reluctant denial. Hatred against the British people, which he considers a fatal infatuation, is undoubtedly widely prevalent in Germany. "The majority of Germans have lost all sense of impartiality and human feeling as regards the actions and the sufferings, the profound and painful sufferings, of Great Britain, and as regards the manly composure with which Great Britain bears her sufferings." This hatred, however, is no new growth : the Boer War did not create but only accentuated it Of all the sinister manifestations of this hatred—the vile caricatures of the Queen, the flat disbelief in official reports of British successes, Sic.—none impresses Dr. von Stradonitz more powerfully than the astounding fact that his compatriots had converted Paul Kruger—" a man who in the hour of stress, when danger threatened him, cleared out of his fatherland, had himself and his millions conveyed to a place of safety, and left not only the cause of his people but also his wife and family in the lurch "—into a national German hero ! The British, he further remarks, now regard the Germans as disloyal friends. "The German Emperor is to-day the most popular man in Great Britain, and that fact still has it effect. The British regret our unfriendliness, but they do not yet hate us. If, therefore, Mommsen describes the chasm as profound and incurable,' I must express the view that the chasm—as viewed, at all events, from Great Britain—is at the present time profound, but that it has not yet become in- curable." The tone of the letter is so just and sane from beginning to end that we are not surprised to learn that it has proved entirely ineffectual in influencing German public opinion.
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