do not understand us at all. Possibly if they began to
understand us they might hate us even more: but I would rather be hated for
some small but real reason, than pursued with love on account of all kinds
of qualities which I do not possess and which I do not desire. And when the
Germans get their first genuine glimpse of what modern England is like,
they will discover that England has a very broken, belated and inadequate
sense of having an obligation to Europe, but no sort of sense whatever of
having any obligation to Teutonism.

This is the last and strongest of the Prussian qualities we have here
considered. There is in stupidity of this sort a strange slippery
strength: because it can be not only outside rules but outside reason. The
man who really cannot see that he is contradicting himself has a great
advantage in controversy; though the advantage breaks down when he tries
to reduce it to simple addition, to chess, or to the game called war. It
is the same about the stupidity of the one-sided kinship. The drunkard who
is quite certain that a total stranger is his long-lost brother, has a
greater advantage until it comes to matters of detail. "We must have chaos
within," said Nietzsche, "that we may give birth to a dancing star."

In these slight notes I have suggested the principal strong points of
the Prussian character. A failure in honour which almost amounts to a
failure in memory: an egomania that is honestly blind to the fact that
the other party is an ego; and, above all, an actual itch for tyranny
and interference, the devil which everywhere torments the idle and the
proud. To these must be added a certain mental shapelessness which can
expand or contract without reference to reason or record; a potential
infinity of excuses. If the English had been on the German side, the
German professors would have noted what irresistible energies had evolved
the Teutons. As the English are on the other side, the German professors
will say that these Teutons were not sufficiently evolved. Or they will
say that they were just sufficiently evolved to show that they were not
Teutons. Probably they will say both. But the truth is that all that they
call evolution should rather be called evasion. They tell us they are
opening windows of enlightenment and doors of progress. The truth is that
they are breaking up the whole house of the human intellect, that they
may abscond in any direction. There is an ominous and almost mo