Yes, let us be on our guard! Let us not trust to a false sense of security, and let us not put our trust in politics and politicians. Politics are so petty, and politicians so impotent. How many so-called statesmen are there to-day who have the courage of their convictions, and who would not be carried away by the impulses and emotions of the moment?
Such were the weighty words of the European statesman. They were uttered without animus and without passion. They were uttered with the serene detachment of the philosopher and of the experienced man of the world. And they express the deliberate opinions of a confirmed pacifist. And they express the substantial truth.
It would be well if our German friends would ponder and meditate those sober and sobering utterances. It would be well if they would try and give their own explanation of their tragic isolation and of their universal political unpopularity. It would be well if they in turn would ask themselves why political Germany is left without a friend in the wide world? As Maximilian Harden once said: “Uns lebt kein Freund auf der weiten Welt.” Might not the result of such sobering reflections be to induce the Germans to turn over a new leaf? Might it not help to precipitate the downfall of a medieval military bureaucracy? And might it not help to falsify the ominous prophecy of our European statesman that Prussia will more and more control the politics of the German Empire?
We loved the glorious Germany of the past. Let the Germany of to-morrow make herself again as cordially liked as she is feared to-day. But let her understand that no nation will allow herself to be bullied into sympathy. Sympathy must be spontaneous. In the words of one of her greatest thinkers: “Die Liebe ist wie der Glaube, man kann sie nicht erzwingen” (Love is like Faith. You cannot secure it by force).
The complicated and contradictory relations between Russia and Germany can be summed up very briefly. On the one hand, there existed before the war the closest intercourse between the Russian and the German Courts, and that close intercourse extended to the army, to the bureaucracy, to the Universities, to the industrial and commercial classes. On the other hand, the Russian and the German people are mutually repelled. There is a temperamental antagonism between the two nations, between the dour disciplined Prussian and the easygoing disciplined Russian. In the province of ideas, of art and literature, French influence is dominant amongst the intellectual and in the upper classes, but as literature counts for very little, and as trade and industry, as the bureaucracy and the Court, count for a very great deal, and as all these social and political forces hitherto were almost entirely controlled by the Germans, it may be said that before the war German influence was supreme in the Russian Empire.