Either the East will
resist the Turks, and Europe will resist Germany, or else both will
relapse into barbarism, and be condemned to war without ceasing, to
butcheries, to the brutality of force and all its works.
May 27, 1897. [7]
At all events they have not yet won their bet in Berlin that they would
make us look ridiculous and hateful. Those very wise and well-bred
people, who have been advising us to revise our national education, so
as to welcome the Kaiser in 1900, have had but meagre success. As to
the golden stream, which brought us the 8000 marks of the King of
Prussia,[8] thank Heaven, it has not been able to drown our patriotism.
Brother Frenchmen, it is still lawful for lunatics and ill-bred people
like ourselves to remember Sedan, Metz, Strasburg and Paris, as well as
Kronstadt and Toulon. Then let us not forget either the first rays of
sunlight which reach us from Russia, or the darkness of 1870. [9]
There is not a single German journalist (_and I wish to emphasise this
fact most clearly_), even in the ultra-Prussian party, who would have
dared to put his signature to such an article as one of our greatest
newspapers has published concerning William II, whom it describes as "a
humanitarian thinker, a gentle philosopher, thinking only of the
happiness of the human race, of appeasing ancient hatreds and removing
old grudges. How joyfully would he not have restored Metz and
Strasburg had he not been prevented in performing this act by the
historical necessities of his position.
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