have read with interest the letter of comment on Sir
Robert Vansittart's Black Record from your correspondent, Miss Bullet I also know Germany well ; and I had a humble part to play in the Baghdad Railway negotiations conducted by Sir E. Grey as part of his strenuous efforts to placate Berlin before the outbreak of war in 1914. There are, no doubt, a number of Germans who, as your correspondent implies, have stood for a different, and, in some aspects and on some occasions, almost an antagonistic set of nationil qualities to those extolled by the Nazis and exemplified by a long tradition of cynical bad faith at the Prussian Court. But unfor. tunately, as no less a historical authority than Mr. H. A. L. Fisher wrote in his essay (published by the Oxford University Press iu 592o) entitled Modern German Historians: The dynamic forces during the later half of the century were men of a very different type from that band of patriot scholars. of whom Dahlmann may be taken as a conspicuous example. whose life hopes had been crushed by the failure of the consti- tutional movement of 1848.
If this is true of Professors of Realpolitik like Heinrich voa Treitschke, how much truer is it of those who have held sway over Germany in the twentieth century? The difficulty with Germany is that she wants to be, and believes she has a right to become, the Herrenvolk. Until she has abandoned this aspiration for the subjugation of others she cannot be a fruitful collaborator in the great tasks of civilisation. We need not vouch for the unerring wisdom of all that Sir Robert Vansittart has written. He has, almost in superabundant measure, the defects of his remarkable qualities. But those remarkabie qualities have, on the whole, been•employed to the great and lasting advantage of the cause of peace when be emphasises to the world the historic maxim of Frederick II d Prussia: e prends d'abord ; je trouverai toufours des pedants pout prouver mes droits.
So long as this attitude informs German foreign policy we Cal have no faith in her written pledges, and must strike her weapon from her hand and keep her disarmed. But while this is an ineluctable necessity, we should make it one of our first aims in the Peace Treaties to remove economic grievances, in so far as they may have a genuine basis.—Yours faithfully, ALWYN PARKER. Foldsdown, Thursley, Godalming.
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