e German Empire?

We loved the glorious Germany of the past. Let the Germany of
to-morrow make herself again as cordially liked as she is feared
to-day. But let her understand that no nation will allow herself to
be bullied into sympathy. Sympathy must be spontaneous. In the words
of one of her greatest thinkers: "Die Liebe ist wie der Glaube, man
kann sie nicht erzwingen" (Love is like Faith. You cannot secure it by
force).

CHAPTER XIV

RUSSIA AND GERMANY

I.

The complicated and contradictory relations between Russia and Germany
can be summed up very briefly. On the one hand, there existed before
the war the closest intercourse between the Russian and the German
Courts, and that close intercourse extended to the army, to the
bureaucracy, to the Universities, to the industrial and commercial
classes. On the other hand, the Russian and the German people are
mutually repelled. There is a temperamental antagonism between the two
nations, between the dour disciplined Prussian and the easygoing
disciplined Russian. In the province of ideas, of art and literature,
French influence is dominant amongst the intellectual and in the upper
classes, but as literature counts for very little, and as trade and
industry, as the bureaucracy and the Court, count for a very great
deal, and as all these social and political forces hitherto were
almost entirely controlled by the Germans, it may be said that before
the war German influence was supreme in the Russian Empire.

II.

Until Peter the Great, the Romanov Family was a national dynasty. It
had remained national from sheer necessity, as no European Court would
have cared to intermarry with Tatar and Barbarian Princes. Even at the
end of Peter the Great's reign the prestige of Russia had scarcely
asserted itself in the politics of the West. Peter the Great expressed
a keen desire to pay a visit to the Court of Louis XIV. He was
politely given to understand that his visit would not be acceptable,
even as a poor relation will be told that his visit is not welcome to
a kinsman in exalted position. After the death of Louis, the Tsar
again asked to be received at Versailles. This time his overtures were
accepted, but even at the Court of the Regent his visit caused the
greatest embarrassment to the masters of ceremonies. The situation was
a tragi-comic one. French etiquette could not decide whether the Tatar
Prince was to receive the honours which belong of right only t