“If I were a bourgeois,” he answered laughingly, “I should answer in the negative. You still have your stockings and your bankers, matters of considerable importance in the eyes of the bourgeoisie of every land. But I am a socialist and a democrat. The minimum programme of our party is to effect the overthrow of Prussian absolutism, and to apply throughout Germany that parliamentary regime which is the _conditio sine qua non_ of all social advance. But you French, for your part, hold this parliamentary regime in scorn. What would you have me think of a nation which repents of its virtues, which makes fun of its chief glory?
“Here in Germany we read your Maurras and similar writers.[3] We are told that in France these men have the ear of the younger generation. It astounds us. It seems to us insane, this cheerful renunciation of the tradition which has made you famous, and for which you are still idolized by all that is noblest in the world. Do you find this strange? When material force is failing you, you, the noble nation, become rabid apologists of the regime of force, of ‘the man with the big stick.’ You take Machiavel for master. You ask for a French Bismarck. You declare yourselves to be royalists, imperialists, absolutists. I can see no difference between your romano-positive young men and our own _echten Deutschen_, those energumens who deafen us in our public squares with their _hochs_ to the Kaiser, who shout their _Deutschland über alles_ at every _prosit_, and who pile monument upon monument in honour of the militarist Moloch, until the appearance of our towns becomes intolerable. Young Frenchmen converted to the Germany of the junkers, blood-brothers of our idiot of a crown prince! What a farce! But for us, the German socialists, this is merely an additional reason for the redoubling of our energies. Our watchword to-day is extremely simple: to raise in Europe and to carry onward to victory the standard of democracy which has fallen from the hand of France!”
“Such is really your idea of France, your own, and that of all the German left?”
“To speak frankly, it is with us a dogma that generous and humane France is dead, and that all that was best in her spirit has entered into us.”