I do not think many people in this country, even in high places, have yet understood how great, as to be almost invincible, are the military and industrial resources of Germany.
The strength given by unity of purpose, by self-sacrifice of individual to national requirements, by organisation of disciplined masses, is the strength of Germany, behind which is the all-prevailing spirit of the motto, "Deutschland über Alles," the Fatherland above all things, and before all things. The end justifying the means in the name of a perverted patriotism, whose end is self-glorification, whose means include among other horrors the murder of an innocent and defenceless civilian population.
This German patriotism, a monstrous caricature of the noblest of virtues, is the only ideal which the brutal materialism of Prussia can still pretend to claim for its own.
Chivalry, honour, and a fair name, the ideals for which men will cheerfully die, Germany has destroyed and buried in the wreckage of Belgian homesteads.
In my carriage-window conversations with German soldiers, to whom it might have been dangerous to express myself as frankly as I have just done here, I always felt that I was dealing with people possessed by an "idée fixe." Evil, as long as it was German evil, was right.
Pride has brought these people to believe that all law, religious and ethical, should be subservient to the interests of the Fatherland. The German pride is something quite apart from the common conceit with which all men and all nations are afflicted, for the foolish British bumptiousness, which of late years has not been so much in evidence, due to ignorance and want of intercourse with Continental nations, does not strike deep enough into the national character to affect the moral sanity of the race. But German pride working through several generations has apparently destroyed all sense of right and wrong. It has become, therefore, impossible to convince the German people of wrong-doing.
I once ventured to say, in answer to one man who was very indignant with "England's treachery" (he was a kultured man and addressed me as a "hireling of La Perfide Albion"), that at any rate we had not invaded Belgium in breach of a solemn treaty. I fully expected to be chastised for my boldness, but my remark did not arouse any indignation. I was told quite simply that "even if there was any truth in my statement the necessity of Germany was supreme and above all."