My mission was a failure.  I came back without any expressions of good will from public men and with an uneasy sense of dangerous fires smouldering beneath the political life of Germany—­fires of hate not easily quenched by friendly or sentimental articles in the English Liberal Press.  And yet among the ordinary people in railway trains and restaurants, beer-halls and hotels, I had found no hostility to me as an Englishman.  Rather they had gone out of their way to be friendly.  Some of the university students of Leipzig had taken me to a public dance, expressed their admiration for English sports, and asked my opinion about the merits of various English boxers of whom I had to confess great ignorance.  They were good friendly fellows and I liked them.  In various towns of Germany I found myself admiring the cheerful, bustling gemutlichkeit of the people, the splendid organization of their civic life, their industry and national spirit.  Walking among them sometimes, I used to ponder over the possibility of that unvermeidliche krieg—­that “unavoidable war” which was being discussed in all the newspapers.  Did these people want war with England or with anyone?  The laughter of the clerks and shop-girls swarming down the Friedrichstrasse, the peaceful enjoyment of the middle-class crowds of husbands and wives, lovers and sweethearts, steaming in the heat of brilliantly lighted beer-halls seemed to make my question preposterous.  The spirit of the German people was essentially peaceful and democratic.  Surely the weight of all this middle-class common sense would save them from any criminal adventures proposed by a military caste rattling its sabre on state occasions?  So I came back with a conflict of ideas....

9

A little bald-headed man came into London about two years ago, and his arrival was noted in a newspaper paragraph.  It appeared that he was a great statistician.  He had been appointed by the Governments of Canada and the United States jointly to prepare a “statistical survey of Europe,” whatever that may mean.  I was sent down to call upon him somewhere in the Temple, and I was to get him to talk about his statistics.

But after my introduction he shut the door carefully and, with an air of anxious inquiry through his gold-rimmed spectacles, asked a strange question: 

“Are you an honest young man and a good patriot?”

I could produce no credentials for honesty or patriotism, but hoped that I might not fail in either.

“I suppose you have come to talk to me about my statistics,” he said.

I admitted that this was my mission.

“They are unimportant,” he said, “compared with what I have to tell you.  I am going to talk to you about Germany.  The English people ought to know what I have learnt during a year’s experience in that country, where I have lived all the time in the company of public officials.  Sir, it seems to me that the English people do not know that the entire genius of intellectual Germany is directed to a war against England.  It dominates their thoughts and dreams, and the whole activity of their national intelligence.”