e mind in
moments of exaltation plays strange tricks with the soul. Bismarck may
have dissembled on occasion but he was never a hypocrite. It is the
spirit which inspired this boastful and arrogant speech, which has so
powerfully stimulated Prussian Junkerism, to which I wish to refer.

Had an American uttered these words we would have treated the boast as
a vulgar exhibition of provincial "spread-eagleism," such as
characterized certain classes in this country before the Civil War,
and which Charles Dickens somewhat over-caricatured in _Martin
Chuzzlewit_, but in the mouth of Bismarck, with his cynical
indifference to moral considerations in questions of statecraft, this
piece of rhetorical _spread double-eagleism_, manifests the spirit of
the Prussian military caste since its too easy triumph over France in
1870-1871, a triumph, which may yet prove the greatest calamity that
ever befell Germany, not only in the seeds of hatred which it sowed,
of which there is now a harvest of blood past precedent, but also in
the development of an arrogant pride which has profoundly affected to
its prejudice the noble Germany of Luther, Bach, Beethoven, Goethe,
Schiller, Kant, Humboldt, and Lessing.

To say that Germany "fears" nothing save God is contradicted by its
whole diplomatic history of the last half century. In this it is not
peculiar. The curse of modern statecraft is the largely unreasoning
fear which all nations have of their neighbors. England has feared
Germany only less than Germany has feared England and this nervous
apprehension has bred jealousy, hatred, suspicion, until to-day all
civilized nations are reaping a harvest horrible beyond expression.

The whole history of Germany since 1870 has shown a constant, and at
times an unreasoning fear, first of France, then of the Slav, and
latterly and in its most acute form, of England. I do not mean that
Germany has been or is now animated by any spirit of craven cowardice.
There has not been in recorded history a braver nation, and the
dauntless courage with which, even at this hour, thousands of Germans
are going with patriotic songs on their lips to "their graves as to
their beds," is worthy of all admiration.

The whole statecraft of Germany for over forty years has been inspired
by an exaggerated apprehension of the intentions of its great
neighbors. This fear followed swiftly upon the triumph of 1871, for
Germany early showed its apprehension that France might r