Organisation is the glory and the curse of Germany.  The Germans are by nature and training easily influenced, and as a mass they can be led as readily in the right path as in the wrong.  Common-sense administration and co-operation have made their cities places of beauty, health, comfort and pleasure.  But when you stop for a moment in your admiration of the streets, buildings, statues, bridges, in such a city as Munich and enter a crowded hall to sit among people who listen with attention, obedience and delight to a professor venomously instructing them in their duty of “hating with the whole heart and the whole mind,” and convincing them that “only through hate can the greatest obstacles be overcome,” you begin to suspect that something is wrong.

It is part of the Prussian nature to push everything to extremes, a trait which has advantages and disadvantages.  It has resulted in brilliant achievements in chemical and physical laboratories, and in gout, dyspepsia and flabbiness in eating establishments.  A virtue carried too far becomes a vice.  In Germany patriotism becomes jingoistic hatred and contempt for others, organisation becomes the utilisation of servility, obedience becomes willingness to do wrong at command.

Americans and British are inclined to ascribe to the Germans their own qualities.  In nothing is this more obvious than in the English idea that the fair treatment of Germans in England, will beget fair treatment of the English in Germany.  The Prussians, who have many Oriental characteristics—­and some of them, a good deal of Oriental appearance—­think orientally and attribute fair, or what we call sportsmanlike, treatment to fright and a desire to curry favour.

When Maubeuge fell I heard Germans of all classes boast of how their soldiers struck the British who offered to shake hands after they surrendered to the Germans.  Nearly two years later, during the Battle of the Somme, some Berlin papers copied from London papers a report of how British soldiers presented arms to the group of prisoners who had stubbornly defended Ovillers.  I called the attention of several German acquaintances to this as an evidence of Anglo-Saxon sporting spirit, but I got practically the same response in every case.  “Yes, they are beginning at last to see what we can do!” was the angry remark.

The Germans have become more and more “Prussianised” in recent years.  State worship had advanced so far that the German people entered the conflict in the perverted belief that the German Government had used every means to avert war.  It is a mistake, however, to suppose that the German people entered the war reluctantly.  They did not.  There was perfect unity in the joyful thought of German invincibility, easy and complete victory, plenty of plunder, and such huge indemnities that the growing burden of taxation would be thrown off their shoulders.

A country where the innocent children are scientifically inoculated with the virus of hate, where force, and only force, is held to be the determinant internationally of mine and thine, where the morals of the farmyard, are preached from the professorial chair in order to manufacture human cogs for the machine of militarism, is an undesirable and a dangerous neighbour and will continue so until it accepts other standards.  A victorious Germany would not accept other standards.