Excerpt from The Truth About Germany

I have come back from Germany believing that the Germans are better losers than could have been credited in advance or is realised now by those who have not taken the necessary pains to inform themselves. Nor IS this unnatural for human nature bears adversity better than prosperity, and endurance is distinctively a virtue of the German. The Germans distinguish between the territorial victory which the French have won over them, and our victory, which, for want of a better word, I shallcall moral. With the French, their age-old enemies of alien race and qualities, the Germans have often quarrelled about the buffer-lands between the two countries. With ourselves, whom they thought nearer them in nature, they fought fora mastery which, again, I shall call moral. They seem to me to realise their failure and the collapse of their gigantic effort to win world leadership, which has brought them loss and suffering and despair, has opened their eyes to many things. They realise, as never before, the elements of superiority in British life and character. It is not unfair to say that in the Great War our own Overseas Dominions and the United States rediscovered Britain for themselves. So have the Germans done. I found many Germans ready to admit that German nerves are inferior to British, and that life in this country distils somehow a something which makes for victory in the supreme encounters. On the political side they see how' much wiser was Bismarck's policy of maintaining good relations with Britain and Russia than the Haunting provocations of William II. Their experiments in free constitutional government have the hearty backing of most of the nation it is only a minority, of uncertain size, that wishes to go back to the old regime under which the Kaiser, the General Staff of the Army, and the bureaucracy ruled, while the Reichstag provided the decorative exterior of Government. The new experiment is conducted under difficulties. One of these difficulties is that Britain, the home of the Parliamentary principle, views the experiment somewhat sceptically, whereas the Germans, very earnest in the matter, and, perhaps, a little na'r've, had hoped for her benevolence and encouragement.

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