It is not impious to be hopeful.  A Germanized world would be a nightmare.  We have never attempted or desired to govern them, and we must not think that God will so far forget them as to permit them to attempt to govern us.  Now they hate us, but they do not know for how many years the cheerful brutality of their political talk has shocked and disgusted us.  I remember meeting, in one of the French Mediterranean dependencies, with a Prussian nobleman, a well-bred and pleasant man, who was fond of expounding the Prussian creed.  He was said to be a political agent of sorts, but he certainly learned nothing in conversation.  He talked all the time, and propounded the most monstrous paradoxes with an air of mathematical precision.  Now it was the character of Sir Edward Grey, a cunning Machiavel, whose only aim was to set Europe by the ears and make neighbours fall out.  A friend who was with me, an American, laughed aloud at this, and protested, without producing the smallest effect.  The stream of talk went on.  The error of the Germans, we were told, was always that they are too humane; their dislike of cruelty amounts to a weakness in them.  They let France escape with a paltry fine, next time France must be beaten to the dust.  Always with a pleasant outward courtesy, he passed on to England.  England was decadent and powerless, her rule must pass to the Germans.  ’But we shall treat England rather less severely than France,’ said this bland apostle of Prussian culture, ’for we wish to make it possible for ourselves to remain in friendly relations with other English-speaking peoples.’  And so on—­the whole of the Bernhardi doctrine, explained in quiet fashion by a man whose very debility of mind made his talk the more impressive, for he was simply parroting what he had often heard.  No one criticized his proposals, nor did we dislike him.  It all seemed too mad; a rather clumsy jest.  His world of ideas did not touch our world at any point, so that real talk between us was impossible.  He came to see us several times, and always gave the same kind of mesmerized recital of Germany’s policy.  The grossness of the whole thing was in curious contrast with the polite and quiet voice with which he uttered his insolences.  When I remember his talk I find it easy to believe that the German Emperor and the German Chancellor have also talked in such a manner that they have never had the smallest opportunity of learning what Englishmen think and mean.

While the German doctrine was the plaything merely of hysterical and supersensitive persons, like Carlyle and Nietzsche, it mattered little to the world of politics.  An excitable man, of vivid imagination and invalid constitution, like Carlyle, feels a natural predilection for the cult of the healthy brute.  Carlyle’s English style is itself a kind of epilepsy.  Nietzsche was so nervously sensitive that everyday life was an anguish to him, and broke his strength.  Both were poets, as Marlowe was