A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending, at the house of a prominent political leader, a representative gathering of politicians, diplomats, and journalists, who were met to consider the best means of promoting Anglo-German friendship. In answer to a speech of mine, an eminent German publicist and editor of an influential monthly review delivered an eloquent address in broken French. To hear a German address in French an audience of Germanophile Englishmen was certainly a ludicrous situation! But the speaker realized that it would be hopeless to use the German language, even to an assembly specially interested in supporting Anglo-German friendship.
How long, my classical friends, are we going to submit to these disastrous results of your monopoly? _Quousque tandem!_ How long are we going to stand this scandal of international illiteracy and ignorance, fraught with such ominous peril for the future? How long is this nation going to be hoodwinked by an infinitesimal minority of reactionary dons and obscurantist parsons, determined to force a smattering of Greek down the throats of a reluctant youth? How long is modern culture to be kept back under the vain pretence of maintaining the culture of antiquity, but in reality in response to an ignoble dread of enlightenment and progress, and in order to protect vested interests and to maintain political, intellectual, and religious reaction?
MECKLENBURG, THE PARADISE OF PRUSSIAN JUNKERTHUM
The tourist who takes the express train between Berlin and Copenhagen, one hour after he has left the Prussian capital reaches a vast plain more than half the size of Belgium, where barren moorlands alternate with smiling fields, where dormant lakes are succeeded by dark pine-forests. Few travellers ever think of breaking their journey on this melancholy plain, the territory of the Grand Dukes of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Strelitz. They have not the remotest suspicion that these Grand Duchies of Mecklenburg, which they cross in such listless haste, are, from a political point of view, one of the most fascinating countries of Europe. Mecklenburg has for the students of comparative politics the same sort of interest which an Indian reserve territory, or the Mormon State of Utah, has for the traveller in the United States, or which a cannibal tract in the equatorial Congo forest has for the explorer of Central Africa. For this pleasant land of Mecklenburg-Schwerin is the last survival of a patriarchal and feudal civilization. It is the most perfect type of the paternal Prussian type of government, entirely unspoiled by the Parliamentary institutions of a feeble democratic age.