ENGLAND AND GERMANY.
[To mos EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
Sra,—Twenty-four years ago I first became intimate with German friends in their own country. They were "intel- lectuals," anti-militarists, hating Bismarck and Bismarckism, cosmopolitan, and rather Anglophil in their ideas. As our friendship grew, I discovered one fundamental assumption at the bottom of their minds,—that, if only by the whirligig of chance, England and Germany must some day come into conflict, and it must then fare ill with a country in which the citizen was not prepared to defend his home. This revelation was rendered all the more impressive by my friends' extreme reluctance to talk of these things, and by their unfeigned surprise that so evident a truth should not long ago have dawned upon me. The question of war or peace lies from day to day in the hands of the Kaiser and his Bundesrath of fifty- eight men; and though the vast mass of citizens have no wish to fight, yet if war must come, no enemy would seem more natural than this England, which for a whole generation has been steadily losing popularity and respect in Germany. There may be many explanations of our unpopularity; but we know one simple reason for the contempt. No Govern- ment dares even to suggest in England such an organisation for home defence as the very Socialists on the Continent accept, in Mazzini's words, as "one of the most sacred duties of a citizen." No foreigner believes that we shirk this duty out of magnanimity—we are rapidly ceasing to believe it our- selves—and even though there were no more than the belief in our defencelessness, even though we were really as strong and ready as ever behind this appearance of neglect, yet the bare belief, and the scorn which grows with it from day to day, are among the most serious menaces to European peace.—I am,
Previous page
