"GERMAN CHARACTER AND BRITISH APATHY." (To THE EDITOR OF THE
" SPECTATOR.") hold no brief for the German nation—God forbid! This war has cost me a son. Though of genuine British stock, this son was born over twenty-three years ago in Germany. When he was three months old we nearly lost him. Our German doctor, so callous that no patient was anything to him but a subject, sug- gested it were better he should die. Another German doctor, as tender as a loving mother, nursed hipt back to life.
This war has brought the worst elements in the German race to the surface, and for this the whole nation deserves punishment that cannot be too severe. Still I refuse to believe that there is no human feeling left in Germany, which, when this madness has passed, will help to purify the whole nation. Have we not a Humanity League in Holland formed of Germans who abhor their Country's deeds ? And what about men like the author of J'Accuse 7 Can we not also count among this humane element Prince Lichnowsky, late German Ambassador in England, and now a fugitive in Switzerland, on account of his revelations ?
A Belgian writer, Ferd. van der Vorst, in a recent booklet entitled La Nation criminelle, etude historigue de la deformation morale allemande, puts the number of independent States in Germany at the time of the French Revolution at fourteen hundred. When we remember that the male descendants of these princelings have preserved their nobility even when they have become humble stationmasters, and that at the outbreak of the war they filled all the most important posts in the Army and the Government, we begin to realize to what extent the nation was permeated by a caste that is now fighing for its life.
After 1815, when the effects of the French Revolution created the first longings for Constitutional liberty, the Hohenzollerns and other princely States, inspired by Metternich, commenced the struggle against democracy. Since then the whole educational system, the whole system of Government, both in Church and State, have had but one end, the enslavement of the nation in the trammels of autocracy for the preservation of the ruling dynas- ties. Hence this war and every war since 1864.—I am, Sir, Lie.,
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