By Gerhart Hauptmann.

The idea of cosmopolitanism has never taken deeper root anywhere than in Germany.  Let any person reflect about our literary translations and then name a nation that has tried so honestly as we to do justice to the spirit and the feelings of other races, to understand their inmost soul in all good-will.

I must out with it:  We had and have no hatred against France:  we have idolized the fine arts, the sculpture and painting and the literature of that country.  The worldwide appreciation of Rodin had its origin in Germany—­we esteem Anatole France, Maupassant, Flaubert, Balzac, as if they were German authors.  We have a deep affection for the people of South France.  We find passionate admirers of Mistral in small German towns, in alleys, in attics.  It was deeply to be regretted that Germany and France could not be friends politically.  They ought to have been, because they were joint trustees of the intellectual treasures of the Continent, because they are two of the great cultivated nations of Europe.  But fate has willed it otherwise.

In the year 1870 the German races fought for the union of the Germans and the German Empire.  Owing to the success of this struggle Germany has enjoyed an era of peace for more than forty years.  A time of budding, growing, becoming strong, flowering, and bearing fruit, without parallel in history.  Out of a population, growing more and more numerous, an ever-increasing number of individuals have been formed.  Individual energy and a general tendency to expand led to the great achievements of our industry, our commerce, and our trade.  I do not think that any American, Englishman, Frenchman, or Italian when in a German family, in German towns, in German hotels, on German ships, in German concerts, in German theatres, at Baireuth, in German libraries, or in German museums, ever felt as if he were among “barbarians.”  We visited other countries and kept an open door for every stranger.

English Relations.

It is with pain and with bitterness that I speak the word England.  I am one of those barbarians on whom the English University of Oxford conferred the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa.  I have friends in England who stand with one foot on the intellectual soil of Germany.  Haldane, formerly English Minister of War, and with him countless other Englishmen, made regular pilgrimages to the little barbarous town of Weimar, where the barbarians Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland, and others, have created another world for humanity.  We have a poet, whose plays, more than those of any other German poet, have become national property; his name is Shakespeare.  This Shakespeare is, at the same time, the prince of English poets.  The mother of our Emperor is an English woman, the wife of the King of England a German, and yet this nation, so closely related by blood and choice, has declared war against us.  Why?  Heaven only knows.  This much, however, is certain, that the now beginning European concert, saturated with blood, as it is, has an English statesman for its impresario and its conductor.  It is doubtful, however, whether the finale of this terrible music will find the same conductor at the stand.  “My cousin, you did not mean well either with yourselves or with us when your tools threw the fire-brand into our dwellings!”