The Times of Tuesday summarised a remarkable letter published in
the Siecie by a German Professor who visited England along with the deputation of journalists in June. The writer gives this country no credit for disinterested hospitality. England needs peace, because she has great financial schemes in prospect in South Africa, and Germany has no objection to meeting her half-way. But on one point Germany cannot compromise,—the disarmament of Army or Navy. He cannot share the hopes of universal peace which certain English idealists hold. Germany's specific character is that of a military State, and "no nation can, without speedy decline, treat with contempt the institutions to which it owes its birth." England has at heart the contempt of a rich commercial Power for the "sailor's shirt and the soldier's tunic." Not so Germany, who knows that her peculiar strength rests in her "almost inexhaustible military reserve." "Must the German Empire," the writer exclaims, "renounce this natural advantage by disarmament, or by the inter- national limitation of her contingents ? We are no longer so stupid as that." We have never done the German people the injustice of supposing that they were.
