n popular persuasion.
They have had a very good opportunity. The British Empire does contain many
people who have been badly treated in various ways: the Irish, the Boers;
nay, the Americans themselves, whose national existence began with being
badly treated. With these the Prussians have done comparatively little; and
with Europeans of your sort nothing. They have never once really
sympathised with the feeling of a Switzer for Switzerland; the feeling of a
Norwegian for Norway; the feeling of a Tuscan for Tuscany. Even when
nations are neutral, Prussia can hardly bear them to be patriotic. Even
when they are courting every one else they can praise no one but
themselves. They fail in diplomacy, they fail in debate, they fail even in
demagogy. They have stupid plots, stupid explanations, and even stupid
apologies. But there is one thing they really do not fail in. They do not
fail in finding people stupid enough to carry them out.

Now, it is this question I would ask you to consider; you, as a good middle
type of the Latins, a Liberal but a Catholic, an artist but a soldier. The
danger to the whole civilisation of which Rome was the fountain lies in
this. That the more this strange Pruss people fail in all the other things,
the more they will fall back on this mere fact of a brutal obedience. They
will give orders; they have nothing else to give. I say that this is the
question for you; I do not say, I do not dream of saying, that the answer
is for me. It is for you to weigh the chance that their very failures in
the arts of peace will drive them back upon the arts of war. They could
not, and they did not, dupe your people in diplomacy. They did the most
undiplomatic thing that can be done; they concealed a breach of partnership
without even concealing the concealment. They instigated the intrigue in
Austria in such a way that Italy could honestly claim all the freedom of
past ignorance, combined with all the disillusionment of present knowledge.
They so ran the Triple Alliance that they had to admit your grievance, at
the very moment when they claimed your aid. The English are stupider and
less sensitive than you are; but even the English found the German
Chancellor's diplomacy not insinuating but simply insulting; I swear I
would be a better diplomatist myself. In the same way, there is no danger
of people like you being corrupted in controversy. There is no fear that
the professors who pullulate all over the Baltic Pla