During the time I spent in Hildesheim you could have heard every single grievance that was used as propaganda in neutral countries during the European War, and when I was in Italy during the war, Italians expressed opinions to me which were obviously German in inspiration and were echoes of what I used to hear in Hildesheim.
I never met a German who had been to England, but they always had the most clearly defined and positive views of every branch of English life. When I was at school at Hildesheim, the book the boys used to read to teach them English was a book about social conditions and domestic life in England, described by a German who, I suppose, had been to England. He had a singular gift for misunderstanding the simplest and most ordinary occurrences and phenomena of English life and the English character.
I suppose it would be true to say that the English did not know the Germans any better than the Germans knew them. English statesmen, with one exception, certainly knew little of Germany, but there is this difference. The English admitted their ignorance, their indifference, and passed on. They never theorised about the Germans, nor dogmatised. They never said: “There is no cheese in Germany,” or: “The Germans cannot play football.” They did not know whether they did or not, and cared still less.
During the Boer War, the German Press voiced with virulence all that the middle class in Germany had thought for years, and we were astonished at this explosion of violence; but in reality this was no new phenomenon; it was the natural expression of feelings that had existed for long and which now found a favourable outlet.
Of course, in the upper classes, things, for all I know, may have been quite different. I know that there were influential Germans who always wished for good relations between the two countries, but even there they were in a minority.
I left Germany grateful for many things, extremely fond of many of the people I had known, but convinced that there was not the slightest chance of popular opinion in Germany ever being favourable towards England, as the feeling the Germans harboured was one of envy—the envy a clever person feels for someone he knows to be more stupid than himself yet to be far more successful, and who succeeds without apparent effort, where he has laboriously tried and failed.