_ men, of real peace-lovers, concerning William II, concerning
this protector of the Red Sultan, this renegade and denier of his
faith, who has sold his soul in order to govern the world through evil,
through trickery, through force and through war. You have only to read
the German legends, to analyse the souls of the traditional heroes of
Germany, to see that they are indeed much more closely allied to the
Turks (who have only understood Islamism under its aspects of conquest)
than they are to the traditions which Europe has inherited from Greece
and from her daughters, Rome and Byzantium.

The struggle of to-day lies between these two spirits: one the
barbarian spirit, the spirit of conquest, which knows no other law but
force, the spirit which subdues and kills, represented by Turkey and by
Germany; the other, the spirit of civilisation, of love, which knows no
other law than the right, the spirit which emancipates and vivifies,
the spirit of Greece, from which European civilisation is drawn,
excepting always that of the Germans and Turks. Either the East will
resist the Turks, and Europe will resist Germany, or else both will
relapse into barbarism, and be condemned to war without ceasing, to
butcheries, to the brutality of force and all its works.

May 27, 1897. [7]

At all events they have not yet won their bet in Berlin that they would
make us look ridiculous and hateful. Those very wise and well-bred
people, who have been advising us to revise our national education, so
as to welcome the Kaiser in 1900, have had but meagre success. As to
the golden stream, which brought us the 8000 marks of the King of
Prussia,[8] thank Heaven, it has not been able to drown our patriotism.
Brother Frenchmen, it is still lawful for lunatics and ill-bred people
like ourselves to remember Sedan, Metz, Strasburg and Paris, as well as
Kronstadt and Toulon. Then let us not forget either the first rays of
sunlight which reach us from Russia, or the darkness of 1870. [9]

There is not a single German journalist (_and I wish to emphasise this
fact most clearly_), even in the ultra-Prussian party, who would have
dared to put his signature to such an article as one of our greatest
newspapers has published concerning William II, whom it describes as "a
humanitarian thinker, a gentle philosopher, thinking only of the
happiness of the human race, of appeasing ancient hatreds and removing
old grudges. How joyfully would he not hav