And Germany, Germany will be above
and over all! The glory and the splendour of the Hohenzollerns will
shine upon the entire universe, and the German Emperor, Emperor of
Emperors, like the King of Kings, will have nothing to fear until the
Heavens fall.
And we, who have forgotten nothing of the Terrible Year and what it
took from us, we, who can see under the left breast of our beloved
France, her bleeding heart, ravished Alsace-Lorraine, we shall lift our
eyes unto Heaven, our last hope, beseeching it to strike down the
presumptuous one, since men are afraid of him.
April 10, 1895. [11]
It has always been a dream of mine to see a newspaper founded under the
title _Foreign Opinion_, a sheet confined to information, in which
would be presented, clearly, simply, and held together by an
intelligent sequence of ideas, quotations from the principal organs of
those countries in which we have interests, either identical or
opposed. Statesmen and Members of Parliament would be compelled to
read such a paper. A knowledge of foreign opinion would render the
greatest services to public opinion in this country, for it would
compel our somewhat self-centred mind to take into consideration the
judgment of others, to determine the justice or the harshness of the
criticism directed against us, and to draw, from the study of these
things, warnings and rules of conduct.
To take an immediate instance, let me give my readers an extract from
the _Muenchner Nachtrichten_, a newspaper, which as a rule does not
share the brutal harshness of the Berlin Press with regard to our
feelings and their expression in French newspapers--
"These foolishly vain Frenchmen, sitting in their meagre little thicket
of laurels, contemplate with evident displeasure the stirring of the
winds in the great forest of German oaks, and their discontent finds
expression in ways that are frequently comical.
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