German blood she wants to let.  Germany is surrounded by enormously wicked people, I gather, all swollen with envy, hatred and malice, and all of gigantic size.  In the middle of these monsters browses Germany, very white and woolly-haired and loveable, a little lamb among the nations, artlessly only wanting to love and be loved, weak physically compared to its towering neighbours, but strong in simplicity and the knowledge of its gute Recht.  And when they say these things they all turn to me for endorsement and approval—­they’ve given up seeking response from the Swede, because she only eats—­and I hastily run over my best words and pick out the most suitable one, which is generally herrlich, or else ich gratuliere.  The gigantic, the really cosmic cynicism I fling into it glances off their comfortable thick skins unnoticed.

I think Kloster is right, and they haven’t grown up yet.  People like the Koseritzes, people of the world, don’t show how young they are in the way these middle-class Germans do, but I daresay they are just the same really.  They have the greediness of children too,—­I don’t mean in things to eat, though they have that too, and take the violent interest of ten years old in what there’ll be for dinner—­I mean greed for other people’s possessions.  In all their talk, all their expoundings of deutsche Idealen, I have found no trace of consideration for others, or even of any sort of recognition that other nations too may have rights and virtues.  I asked Kloster whether I hadn’t chanced on a little group of people who were exceptions in their way of looking at life, and he said No, they were perfectly typical of the Prussians, and that the other classes, upper and lower, thought in the same way, the difference lying only in their manner of expressing it.

“All these people, Mees Chrees,” he said, “have been drilled.  Do not forget that great fact.  Every man of every class has spent some of the most impressionable years of his life being drilled.  He never gets over it.  Before that, he has had the nursery and the schoolroom:  drill, and very thorough drill, in another form.  He is drilled into what the authorities find it most convenient that he should think from the moment he can understand words.  By the time he comes to his military service his mind is already squeezed into the desired shape.  Then comes the finishing off,—­the body drilled to match the mind, and you have the perfect slave.  And it is because he is a slave that when he has power—­and every man has power over some one—­he is so great a bully.”

“But you must have been drilled too,” I said, “and you’re none of these things.”

He looked at me in silence for a moment, with his funny protruding eyes.  Then he said, “I am told, and I believe it, that no man ever really gets over having been imprisoned.”

  Evening.