It never seemed to occur to him that Belgians or Frenchmen or Dutchmen
might personally prefer to keep on being Belgians or Frenchmen or
Dutchmen, and might have some rights in the matter; indeed might prefer
to die rather than live under a system intolerable to human beings
reared outside the scope of Prussian influence. So far as I might judge,
this never occurred to any of the less eloquent but equally ardent
defenders of this peculiar brand of _Kultur_ with whom I talked during
that fall in the Rhineland country.
We must have been blind then, my companion and I--yes, and deaf too; for
we diagnosed this bigotry as evidences of an egomania, probably confined
to a few hundreds or a few thousands among the German-speaking peoples.
In the light of what has happened since we all know that the disease
affected a whole nation, and was a disease of which, as yet, the
frequent upsettings of their original programme and the absolute
certainty that the programme itself can never be carried out until
Europe and America both are graveyards have not to any very noticeable
extent served to operate as a cure.
In those early, optimistic days these paranoiacs conceived of a world
that should sometime be altogether Prussianised. Their vision was not
bounded by the seas about their own Continent; it extended to other
Continents, our own included. That dream is over and done with. What
they have yet to learn--and they will only be taught it at the muzzle of
guns--is that a civilisation cannot endure when it is half Prussian and
half free. It is my understanding that this country, along with ten or
twelve others, is now committed to the task of enforcing this lesson
upon the consciousness of the only confederation of enemies to a
representative form of government now left upon either hemisphere.