in will overcome the
Latins in logic. Some of them even claim to be super-logical; and say they
are too big for syllogisms; generally having found even one syllogism too
big for them. If they complain either of your abstention from their cause
or your adhesion to any other, you have an unanswerable answer. You will
say, as you did say, that you did not break the Triple Alliance, even for
the sake of peace. It was they who broke it for the sake of war. You,
obviously, had as much right to be consulted about Servia as Austria had;
and on the mere chess-board of argument it is mate in one move. Nor are
they in the least fitted to make an appeal to the popular sentiment of your
people. The English, I dare say, and the French, have talked an amazing
amount of nonsense about you; but they understand a little better. They do
not write exactly like this, which is from the most public and accepted
Prussian political philosopher (Chamberlain). "Who can live in Italy
to-day and mix with its amiable and highly gifted inhabitants without
feeling with pain that here a great nation is lost, irredeemably lost,
because it lacks the inner driving power," etc., which has brought Von
Kluck so triumphantly through Paris. Even a half-educated Englishman, who
has heard of no Italian poet except Dante, knows that he was something more
than amiable. Even a positively illiterate Frenchman, who has heard of no
Italian warrior except Napoleon, knows that it was not in "inner driving
force" that the artilleryman in question was deficient. "Who can live in
Italy to-day?" Evidently the Prussian philosopher can't. His impressions
are taken from Italian operas; not from Italian streets; certainly not from
Italian fields. As a matter of fact such images of Italy as burn in the
memories of most open-minded Northerners who have been there, are of
exactly the other kind. I for one should be inclined to say, "Who can live
in Italy to-day without feeling that a woman feeding children, or a man
chopping wood, may almost touch him with fear with the fulness of their
humanity: so that he can almost smell blood, as one smells burning?"
Italians often look lazy; that is, they look as if they would not move; but
not as if they could not move, as many Germans do. But even though this
formula fitted the Italians, it seems scarcely calculated to please them.
For the Prussians, then, with the failure of their diplomacy, the failure
of their philosophy, we may also place