d the party after dinner. His
name was Professor Otto von Gierke of the University of Berlin. I
gathered from his conversation that he and his family had been very
kindly entertained in London. His manner was somewhat harsh and
over-bearing, but his white hair and spectacles gave him a venerable
aspect, and it was clear that he and his wife and daughter belonged to a
cultivated and intelligent _milieu_. But who among his English hosts
could possibly have imagined the thoughts and ideas in that grey head? I
find a speech of his in a most illuminating book by a Danish professor
on German Chauvinist literature. [_Hurrah and Hallelujah!_ By J. P.
Bang, D.D., Professor of Theology at the University of Copenhagen,
translated by Jessie Broechner.] The speech was published in a collection
called _German Speeches in Hard Times_, which contains names once so
distinguished as those of Von Wilamovitz and Harnack.

Professor von Gierke's effusion begins with the usual German falsehoods
as to the origin of the war, and then continues--"But now that we
Germans are plunged in war, we will have it in _all its grandeur and
violence_! Neither fear nor _pity_ shall stay our arm before it has
completely brought our enemies to the ground." They shall be reduced to
such a condition that they shall never again dare even to snarl at
Germany. Then German Kultur will show its full loveliness and strength,
enlightening "the understanding of the foreign races absorbed and
incorporated into the Empire, and making them see that only from German
kultur can they derive those treasures which they need for their own
particular life."

At the moment when these lines were written--for the book was published
early in the war--the orgy of murder and lust and hideous brutality
which had swept through Belgium in the first three weeks of the war was
beginning to be known in England; the traces of it were still fresh in
town after town and village after village of that tortured land; while
the testimony of its victims was just beginning to be sifted by the
experts of the Bryce Commission.

The hostages of Vareddes, the helpless victims of Nomeny, of
Gerbeviller, of Sermaize, of Sommeilles, and a score of other places in
France were scarcely cold in their graves. But the old white-haired
professor stands there, unashamed, unctuously offering the kultur of his
criminal nation to an expectant world! "And when the victory is won," he
says complacently--"the whole