It is a matter of common knowledge, one which a man must be blind and deaf not to understand, that for many years Germany, intoxicated by her success in war and by her increase of wealth, has regarded the British Empire with eyes of jealousy and hatred.  It has never been alleged by those who gave expression to this almost universal national passion that Great Britain had in any way, either historically or commercially, done Germany a mischief.  Even our most bitter traducers, when asked to give any definite historical reasons for their dislike, were compelled to put forward such ludicrous excuses as that the British had abandoned the Prussian King in the year 1761, quite oblivious of the fact that the same Prussian King had abandoned his own allies in the same war under far more damaging circumstances, acting up to his own motto that no promises are binding where the vital interests of a State are in question.  With all their malevolence they could give no examples of any ill turn done by us until their deliberate policy had forced us into antagonism.  On the other hand, a long list of occasions could very easily be compiled on which we had helped them in some common cause, from the days of Marlborough to those of Blucher.  Until the twentieth century had turned they had no possible cause for political hatred against us.  In commerce our record was even more clear.  Never in any way had we interfered with that great development of trade which has turned them from one of the poorest to one of the richest of European States.  Our markets were open to them untaxed, while our own manufactures paid 20 per cent. in Germany.  The markets of India, of Egypt, and of every portion of the empire which had no self-appointed tariff, were as open to German goods as to British ones.  Nothing could possibly have been more generous than our commercial treatment.  No doubt there was some grumbling when cheap imitations of our own goods were occasionally found to oust the originals from their markets.  Such a feeling was but natural and human.  But in all matters of commerce, as in all matters political before the dawn of this century, they have no shadow of a grievance against us.

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And yet they hated us with a most bitter hatred, a hatred which long antedates the days when we were compelled to take a definite stand against them.  In all sorts of ways this hatred showed itself, in the diatribes of professors, in the pages of books, in the columns of the press.  Usually it was a sullen, silent dislike.  Sometimes it would flame up suddenly into bitter utterance, as at the time of the unseemly dispute around the deathbed of the Emperor’s father, or on the occasion of the Jameson Raid.  And yet this bitter antagonism was in no way reciprocated in this country.  If a poll had been taken at any time up to the end of the century as to which European country was our natural ally, the vote would have gone overwhelmingly for Germany.  “America