e of any considerable section of British opinion, which is
as a whole nearly as free from any sustained hatred of the Germans as it
was at the beginning of the war. There are, of course, waves of
indignation at such deliberate atrocities as the _Lusitania_ outrage or
the Zeppelin raids, Wittenberg will not easily be forgotten, but it
would take many Sir George Makgills to divert British anger from the
responsible German Government to the German masses.

That lack of any essential hatred does not mean that British opinion is
not solidly for the continuation of this war against militarist
imperialism to its complete and final defeat. But if that can be
defeated to any extent in Germany by the Germans, if the way opens to a
Germany as unmilitary and pacific as was Great Britain before this war,
there remains from the British point of view nothing else to fight
about. With the Germany of _Vorwaerts_ which, I understand, would
evacuate and compensate Belgium and Serbia, set up a buffer state in
Alsace-Lorraine, and another in a restored Poland (including Posen), the
spirit of the Allies has no profound quarrel at all, has never had any
quarrel. We would only too gladly meet that Germany at a green table
to-morrow, and set to work arranging the compensation of Belgium and
Serbia, and tracing over the outlines of the natural map of mankind the
new political map of Europe.

Still it must be admitted that not only in Great Britain but in all the
allied countries one finds a certain active minority corresponding to
Sir George Makgill's noisy following, who profess to believe that all
Germans to the third and fourth generation (save and except the
Hanoverian royal family domiciled in Great Britain) are a vile,
treacherous, and impossible race, a race animated by an incredible
racial vanity, a race which is indeed scarcely anything but a conspiracy
against the rest of mankind.

The ravings of many of these people can only be paralleled by the stuff
about the cunning of the Jesuits that once circulated in
ultra-Protestant circles in England. Elderly Protestant ladies used to
look under the bed and in the cupboard every night for a Jesuit, just as
nowadays they look for a German spy, and as no doubt old German ladies
now look for Sir Edward Grey. It may be useful therefore, at the present
time, to point out that not only is the aggressive German idea not
peculiar to Germany, not only are there endless utterances of French
Chauvini