you confined yourself to
single words, uttered at intervals of about a month or so, no one could
possibly raise any rational objection, or subject them to any rational
criticism. In time you might come to use whole sentences without
revealing the real state of things.

Through neglect of these maxims, my dear Professor, every one of your
attacks upon England has gone wide. In pure fact they have not touched
the spot, which the real critics of England know to be a very vulnerable
spot. We have a real critic of England in Mr. Bernard Shaw, whose name
you parade but apparently cannot spell; for in the paper to which I have
referred he is called Mr. Bernhard Shaw. Perhaps you think he and
Bernhardi are the same man. But if you quoted Mr. Bernard Shaw's
statement instead of misquoting his name, you would find that his
criticism of England is exactly the opposite of your own; and naturally,
for it is a rational criticism. He does not blame England for being
against Germany. He does most definitely blame England for not being
sufficiently firmly and emphatically on the side of Russia. He is not
such a fool as to accuse Sir Edward Grey of being a fiendish Machiavelli
plotting against Germany; he accuses him of being an amiable
aristocratic stick who failed to frighten the Junkers from their plan of
war. Now, it is not in the least a question of whether we happen to like
this quality or that: Mr. Shaw, I rather fancy, would dislike such
verbose compromise more than downright plotting. It is simply the fact
that Englishmen like Grey are open to Mr. Shaw's attack and are not open
to yours. It is not true that the English were sufficiently clearheaded
or self-controlled to conspire for the destruction of Germany. Any man
who knows England, any man who hates England as one hates a living
thing, will tell you it is not true. The English may be snobs, they may
be plutocrats, they may be hypocrites, but they are not, as a fact,
plotters; and I gravely doubt whether they could be if they wanted to.
The mass of the people are perfectly incapable of plotting at all, and
if the small ring of rich people who finance our politics were plotting
for anything, it was for peace at almost any price. Any Londoner who
knows the London streets and newspapers as he knows the Nelson column or
the Inner Circle, knows that there were men in the governing class and
in the Cabinet who were literally thirsting to defend Germany until
Germany, by her own a