reciprocity and scientific research; the power of brute force only recognises the idea of predominance and the subjection of others.  The genius of Prussianised Germany to-day combines the lust of conquest and power with the shopkeeping spirit, but even in this last, there is no idea of reciprocity but only of exclusive encroachment.  Her international misdeeds are past all number; she saps and undermines all that has been laboriously built up by others.  Germanisation carries with it the seeds of disintegration; it is a sower of hatred, proclaiming for its own exclusive benefit the equity of iniquity, the justice of injustice.

Only less extraordinary than the audacity of Prussia is Europe’s failure to realise these truths.  In 1870 Napoleon III was deluded, fooled and compromised, led into war by means of lies.  Nameless intrigues set our generals one against the other.  At a moment when victory was possible, the treachery of Bazaine made defeat inevitable for France, whom the so-called genius of Moltke and Frederick-Carl would never have vanquished.  Having overthrown the Empire, the King of Prussia, who had declared that he was fighting against it alone, made war on France, well aware that sufficient vitality remained in the broken pieces to enable them to come together again, and that, under the threat of a French revanche, Prussia would be able to keep Germany exercised in such a state of mind as would reconcile her to remaining under the military yoke of the Hohenzollerns.  And Europe, without protest, accepts this condition of things, fatal to her interests and security, created for the sole profit of the lowest of nations.  By her self-effacement, indeed, she increased fivefold the influence and power of that nation.

September 31, 1897. [17]

You and I, all of us, we French people in particular, who think that we were born clever, we are all a pack of credulous fools.  Let any one take the trouble to put a little consistency, a little continuity, into the business of fooling us—­especially about outside matters whose origins we ignore, or people whose history we have not closely followed—­and we will swallow anything!

All of us Republicans, all the Liberals of the Second Empire, Edmond Adam, our friends, our group,—­great Heavens! how we swallowed German republicanism and liberalism!  With what brotherly emotion did we not sympathise with the misfortunes of those who, like ourselves, were the vanquished victims of tyranny!  We, Frenchmen and Germans alike, were defending the same principles, the same cause; we were fighting the same good fight for the emancipation of ideas, for the levelling of intellectual frontiers, etc., etc.