Chapter 9

413. [Title.] "The Greatest Criminal against Humanity of the Twentieth Century, KING EDWARD VII. OF ENGLAND. A Curse Pamphlet (_Fluchschrift_),[40] by Lieutenant-Colonel Reinhold Wagner." He it was, he it was that kindled the world-war. He was the incarnation of the boundless selfishness and unscrupulousness of Englishism (_Englaendertum_). Opening words of above-cited pamphlet.

414. White snow, white snow, fall, fall for seven weeks; all may'st thou cover, far and wide, but never England's shame; white snow, white snow, never the sins of England.--G. FALCK, quoted in H.A.H., p. 50.

=British Vices--Hypocrisy, Envy and Greed.=

415. England thinks the hour has come for our annihilation. Why does she want to annihilate us? Because she cannot forgive our strength, our industry, our prosperity! There is no other explanation![41]--PROF. A. v. HARNACK, I.M., 1st October, 1914, p. 25.

416. No other people has misused its riches as England has. With a hypocritically virtuous air, the British Chauvinist has for years been labouring to undermine the German name, and few can have divined with what means he went to work.--"GERMANUS," B.U.D.K., p. 47.

417. We cannot expect our enemies to try to do us justice--though we can, after all, sympathetically understand almost all of them, with the sole exception of the English, in whom the transparently base abstractness of the calculating business spirit lies beneath the level of humanity, and is so positively immoral as to be entirely outside the scope of sympathy.--G. MISCH, V.G.D.K., p. 8.

418. And then England! She does not, like France, send all her sons into the field, but sends specially enlisted troops. There lurks the impelling evil spirit, which has conjured up this war out of hell--the spirit of envy and the spirit of hypocrisy.--PROF. U. V. WILAMOWITZ-MOeLLENDORF, R., pt. i., p. 7.

419. England is a Moloch that will devour everything, a vampire that will suck tribute from all the veins of the earth, a monster snake encircling the whole Equator.--"My German Fatherland," by PASTOR TOLZIEN, quoted in H.A.H., p. 140.

420. In the last attempt at an Anglo-Saxon philosophy, Pragmatism, the test of truth became simply usefulness. It is true that most Englishmen turned against it. Why? Not because this view seemed to them false, but because they thought it inadvisable, and therefore sinful, to blurt out the secret.--O.A.H. SCHMITZ, D.W.D., p. 121.

421. An English poet has invented a symbol that may well be applied to his own country: _The Picture of Dorian Grey._ In the eyes of the world, the hypocritical sinner seems to be endowed with the gift of unfading youth and beauty; but only because he has at home a sedulously concealed portrait of magical properties. In this the vices plough their furrows; in this the features are gradually contorted into a grisly image of guilt; until the day of judgment--the day of self-judgment.--PROF. U. v. WILAMOWITZ-MOeLLENDORF, R., pt. iv., p. 16.

422. Oscar Wilde once wrote an essay on _The Art of Lying_, and his countrymen have since carried this art to a high perfection.--H. S. CHAMBERLAIN, K.A., p. 10.

422a. Another vice has been developed to its highest pitch in this war: to wit, _lying_. England in particular has established a record in this department, even as against the Father of Lies, the Devil.--PROF. F. DELITZSCH, D.R.S.Z., No. 13, p. 20.

422b. Never since human Kultur has existed has such a _deluge of lies and slanders_, of fraud and hypocrisy, been poured forth as ... "pious" England has spread abroad in the name of the triune Christian God. And this shameless hypocrisy must appear all the more revolting, since every one who is at all behind the scenes knows that this British _Christian God_ is in truth the _Bank of England_, the sacred "_Golden Calf_," the idolatrous worship of which is the chief aim of _Pambritismus_, the lordship of England over all other peoples.--PROF. E. HAECKEL, E.W., p. 59.

423. We _must_ be wroth, and we _will_ be wroth, with the whole power of our inner man. We will hate the will of the nation which has so basely set upon our peace-loving people in order to destroy us. We will hate the Satanic powers of arrogance and selfishness, of treachery and cruelty, of lying and hypocrisy. We will fight without scruple, and employ all means of destruction, however terrible they may be. We cannot do otherwise; but we do not hate the individual human beings.... The true, beneficent hatred applies to things, not persons.--_The Fifth Petition in the Lord's Prayer and England_, by PASTOR J. LAHUSEN, quoted in H.A.H., p. 162.

423a. The curse of millions of hapless people falls on the head of the British island kingdom, whose boundless national egoism knows no other goal than the extension of British rule over the whole planet, the exploitation of all other nations to its own benefit, and the filling of its insatiable purse with the gold of all other peoples.--PROF. E. HAECKEL, quoted by P. HEINSICK, W.U.G., p. 4.

424. It is an almost sinister self-contradiction: the individual Englishman, in private life, is by no means devoid of a certain outward decency, perhaps because he thinks it pays: but the public morals of England do not shrink from any baseness.--PROF. G. ROETHE, D.R.S.Z., No. 1, p. 14.

425. It is certain that it was in England that humanity first fell sick of the huckster view of the world. But the English ailment had spread further, and above all it had already begun to attack the body of even the German people.--PROF. W. SOMBART, H.U.H., p. 99.

425a. Covetousness, a huckstering spirit, a thirst for gain, calculating envy, hypocrisy--what despicable vices have they not become to us. We spit at them, we hate them, just because they are British.... Now we walk in gentle innocence through homely pastures, free from greed of money, stripped of all cunning, because--just because it is all British.--PASTOR D. VORWERK, quoted in H.A.H., p. 39.

426. The much-lauded missionary spirit was only a business enterprise, by means of which John Bull filled his purse.--"The Christianity of the Belligerent Nations," by PASTOR ERDMANN, quoted in H.A.H., p. 146.

427. England avers that she makes war against us without hatred, and thinks she is thereby giving proof of high civilization. It is precisely the proof of her cold-hearted baseness.... The self-controlled English gentleman, who makes unemotional war out of commercial envy, is more devilish than the Cossack. He stands to the Frenchman in the relation of the sneaking murderer for gain to the murderer from passion. The gentleman-burglar of Conan Doyle expresses the soul of the nation.--O.A.H. SCHMITZ, D.W.D., p. 15.

428. A nice protector of outraged national rights!!! Thus Richard, Duke of Gloucester, appears with prayer-book and rosary on the terrace of the castle, thus Mephistopheles dons the mask of lawyer and philosopher, thus Iscariot kisses the Saviour.--"My German Fatherland," by PASTOR TOLZIEN, quoted in H.A.H., p. 142.

429. Never has the _mass-misery of war_ ... presented itself to us in such grisly shapes as in this terrible world-war, which has been forced upon us _solely_ by the commercial envy and the _brutal egoism_ of the Christian model-state, _England_.--PROF. E. HAECKEL, E.W., p. 27.

=British Vices--Cowardice and Laziness.=

430. It is the English who may justly be accused of militarism--the people who, in addition to Irish and Scottish hirelings (they themselves, as a rule, prefer to remain at home) place Hindus and Indian mountaineers in the field.--PROF. W. WUNDT, D.N.I.P., p. 143.

431. Envy is utterly foreign to the German nature. But _one_ exception we must now admit. We old fellows ... look with envy at the young, who are risking their fresh life and strength for the Fatherland. Of this envy, at any rate, we must acquit England: its best youth remains quietly at home, and wins victories in the football field, leaving it to salaried hirelings to shed their blood.--PROF. G. ROETHE, D.R.S.Z., No. 1, p. 11.

432. The doctrine of comfort, as a view of the world, certainly comes of evil, and a people who are filled with it, like the English, are little more than a heap of living corpses. The whole body of the people begins to rot.... In England to-day every trade unionist is stuck in the morass of comfort.--PROF. W. SOMBART, H.U.H., p. 102.

433. As soon as it comes to the sanguinary reality, the English hireling's heart drops into his breeches. And the English Scotchmen have not even breeches for it to drop into.--O. SIEMENS, W.L.K.D., p. 19.

434. Whence should courage come?... In our German soldiers it springs from honest German wrath. But the Englishman must shout himself into courage. When the first English troops landed in France, they sang gaily and interrupted their songs by shouts of "Are we down-hearted?" Whereupon the English hireling sought to keep up his spirits by an answering shout of "No!" ... Only their own timidity suggests to the English such questions as to their courage. One need not be any great psychologist to realize this.--O. SIEMENS, W.L.K.D., p. 19.

435. The cunning and unscrupulousness of the pirate does, indeed, survive in the English sailor; he lies in ambush for neutral merchant-ships[!], lays mines in the fairway of neutral neighbour States, and commits deeds of violence of the most manifold kinds; but the resolution of the pirate, the daring intrepidity in attack, he no longer possesses.--"GERMANUS," B.U.D.K., p. 43.

436. The great majority of the English Army are to this day Keltic Irishmen and Keltic Scotchmen; the real Englishmen do not enlist. In the English battles of the past, Englishmen of the nobility no doubt were in command, but the armies consisted of foreign mercenaries, for the most part Germans.--H.S. CHAMBERLAIN, K.A., p. 51.

437. England might, in league with Germany, have _dictated Kultur to the whole world_ ... if she had not been _untrue to the Gospel of Work_!--PROF. A. SCHROeER, Z.C.E., p. 61.

438. The English race ... must always be stimulated by the infusion of new blood, otherwise it would perish of its own indolence.--PROF. A. SCHROeER, Z.C.E., p. 21.

=Treachery to Germanism.=

439. England is now showing on what feeble feet its Germanism rests, how unsound, how profoundly unworthy of the German Thought it is. It cannot shake off its bitter accusers--its Shakespeare and Carlyle, its Dickens and Kingsley. It has committed treason against the spirit of its greatest men, who were filled with the certainty that the German Thought must conquer, and that this victory must be _the_ victory ... of Kultur, civilization and spiritual progress.--K. ENGELBRECHT, D.D.D.K., p. 57.

440. Would to God Professor Engel were right in maintaining that the English are Kelts. Then we should not have to be ashamed of our brothers!--PASTOR B. LOeSCHE, D.S.E.S.D., p. 4.

441. It is useless for publicists to encourage the popular belief that the English prove by their behaviour that they are no longer Teutons; for Teutons they are, and purer Teutons than many Germans.[42]--H.S. CHAMBERLAIN, K.A., p. 45.

442. Does one German cousin fight against another? We good-natured idealists have always dwelt upon this German cousinship. The three-quarters-Keltic England has no feeling of common Germanism.--O.A.H. SCHMITZ, D.W.D., p. 15.

443. What about ... our dear cousins the English, those hucksters whose Germanism we have at last begun openly to question.... Though the English language is doubtless Germanic, that is by no means a proof that the Keltic bastards have acquired the German nature (_Wesen_). We do not count the English-speaking American negroes as belonging to the white race.--O. SIEMENS, W.L.K.D., p. 18.

444. Against us stands the world's greatest sham of a people ... the Judas among nations, who this time, for a change, betrays Germanism for thirty pieces of silver. Against us stands sensual France, the harlot (_Dirne_) among the peoples, to be bought for any prurient excitement, shameless, unblushing, impudent and cowardly [!] with her worthless myrmidons.--"War Devotions," by PASTOR J. RUMP, quoted in H.A.H., p. 117.

=Sir Edward Grey and his Colleagues.=

445. Abysmal hypocrisy ... the national vice has been incarnated for us in Sir Edward Grey.--PROF. G. ROETHE, D.R.S.Z., No. i, p. 14.

446. When that English gentleman, Minister Grey, who has a cancerous tumour in place of a heart, in the end has to reap the infamy he deserves, he will promptly cast it from him as dirt with his horse-hoof.--PASTOR TOLZIEN, in "Patriotic-Evangelical War Lectures," quoted in H.A.H., p. 141.

447. The Englishman treats the foreigner, when he does not need him, as thin air, when he does need him, as a piece of goods; consequently, when he sits in the Cabinet, he considers that, towards a foreign State, a lie is not a lie, deceit is not deceit, and a surprise attack in time of peace is a perfectly legitimate measure, so long as it serves England's interests.--PROF. W. WUNDT, D.N.I.P., p. 131.

448. Sir Edward Grey possesses in a singular degree the gift of carrying on business with complete control of all emotion and elimination of all deep thought. Every third word of such person is the untranslatable, elusive, "I dare say."--O.A.H. SCHMITZ, D.W.D., p. 14.

449. The untruthfulness and unscrupulous brutality with which the English Cabinet carries on the war place it far below the level of Muscovite morality.--"GERMANUS."--B.U.D.K., p. 35.

450. The English diplomatist of the type of Sir Edward Grey holds honesty in political matters to be a blunder and a sin. Therefore he usually expresses himself in a form which is capable of several interpretations.--"GERMANUS," B.U.D.K., p. 18.

451. Sir Edward Grey has for years presided over all the peace conferences--only to ensure the coming of the projected war; he has for years sought a "better understanding" with Germany--only to prevent the honest German statesmen and diplomats from suspecting that a war of annihilation had been irrevocably decreed; the German Emperor, at the last moment, had almost averted the danger of war--Grey, the unctuous apostle of peace, contrived so to shuffle the cards as to render it inevitable.--H.S. CHAMBERLAIN, K.A., p. 66.

_For "shuffling the cards" compare No. 371._

452. The President of the United States, Professor Wilson ... allows American munition works to supply our enemies with unlimited quantities of war material, favours the infamous design of England to starve out Germany, and rises in his "peace" speeches to a height of political and religious hypocrisy in no way inferior to that attained by the English "million-murderer" Grey.--PROF. E. HAECKEL, E.W., p. 61.

=Britain's Great Illusion.=[43]

453. The English regard themselves as the Chosen People, towards which all others are predestined to stand in a relation of more or less complete dependence.--PROF. U. v. WILAMOWITZ-MOeLLENDORF, R. pt. iv., p. 19.

454. Strange as it may appear to us, it is nevertheless unquestionable that all England has from of old been penetrated with the idea that her attainment of uncontested colonial and maritime power was not only to her interest but to that of the whole world, _the dominion over which God had Himself assigned to her_, and that therefore all means to this beneficent end were permissible and well-pleasing to God.--J. RIESSER, E.U.W., p. 10.

455. Just because the English found their national feeling on the consciousness of their kultural successes, and the belief that they alone are _God's chosen people on earth_, every desire of other peoples to assert equality of rights appears to their self-conceit an offence against the will of God.--PROF. A. SCHROeER, Z.C.E., p. 31.

456. The belief in the Kultur-mission entrusted to it by God, in preference to all other peoples, has grown into the very flesh and blood of the English people.--PROF. F. KEUTGEN, B.R.K., p. 7.

457. The English hold that they are literally descended from the ten tribes [!]. But we Germans do not base our relation to Israel on any such fleshly foundation. The German people are the spiritual, the religious parallel of the people of Israel, they are "the true Israel begotten of the Spirit."--DR. PREUSS, quoted in H.A.H., p. 213.

458. Many of the best, most unselfish and most modest Englishmen pray to God in all good faith that He would at last open the eyes of the German people, and especially of the German Emperor, that they may see how wrong and even sinful it is to place any further hindrances in the way of the expansion of the Kingdom of God on earth by "His chosen people," that is to say, the English themselves.--PROF. A. SCHROeER, Z.C.E., p. 12.

459. The Briton regards himself as chosen by Providence, the elect of the Lord, entrusted with a special _mission on this earth_, and placed under the immediate protection of Heaven, with a first claim upon all the good things of the earth.--"GERMANUS," B.U.D.K., p. 11.

460. Our duty to ourselves, and to our English fellow-creatures--since we would fain be, not an imaginary "chosen people" but true children of God--is to give them such a thorough thrashing that they may once for all be cured of the fatal illusion that they have established a monopoly in the dear Lord God, and that the rest of humanity is destined only to serve as a stool for their clumsy feet!--PROF. A. SCHROeER, Z.C.E., p. 70.

461. Perhaps the reason that England's power now stands in so great peril is that, in her self-deceiving vanity, she thought that God had guaranteed her the dominion of the world.--PASTOR M. HENNIG, D.K.U.W., P. 86.

462. It is a matter of fact that the greater part of the English people cherish the pathological imagination that they alone are the true pioneers of Kultur and culture.--PROF. E. HAECKEL, E.W., p. 115.

463. The English now assert the claim of _their_ Kultur to be the only existing, and, indeed, the _God-appointed_ summit of human development, which to attain would mean salvation for all humanity. This is a positively grotesque mixture of national pride and religiosity.--PROF. A. SCHROeER, Z.C.E., p. 12.

464. "England ueber alles" has in England a very solid meaning, as compared with our quite ideally conceived "Deutschland ueber alles." An immense self-assurance, partly reposing on the notion of being in a special sense God's chosen people, gives to these claims a certain inward foundation. In the consciousness of an alleged superiority of moral Kultur, the English aspire to rule the world.--PROF. R. SEEBERG, D.R.S.Z., No. 15, p. 28.

465. Alone among Kultur-peoples, the English know only themselves, and regard all others, without exception, as foreign, inferior creatures, towards whom Nature decrees that the laws of morality, as between man and man, should not hold good, any more than they hold good towards animals and plants.[44]--PROF. A. SCHROeER, Z.C.E., p. 49.

466. There are, of course, many sincerely pious Christians in England. But either they are impotent as against the prevailing passion, or they are blinded by the illusion of the "chosen people," and have therefore lost all power of sober self-criticism.--OBERLEHRER HERMANN SCHUSTER, D.K.K.

=Comic Relief.=

467. England understands by freedom only club-law, with the club always in her own hand.--H.S. CHAMBERLAIN, K.A., p. 22.

468. Since the Cromwellian rule of the sword, the army is so hated in England that an officer, going on duty from his home to the barracks, has to drive in a closed carriage.--O.A.H. SCHMITZ, D.W.D., p. 41.

469. I found everywhere in England, during my last visits in 1907 and 1908, a positively terrifying blind hatred for Germany, and impatient longing for a war of annihilation.--H.S. CHAMBERLAIN, K.A., p. 12.

470. England's army of postal officials amounts to 213,000, distributed through 24,245 post offices; the German Empire has 50,500 post offices and 305,000 officials. Now we can understand--can we not?--why England envies us.--PASTOR M. HENNIG, D.K.U.W., p. 39.

471. One finds in England no geniality, no broad, kindly humour, no gaiety. Everything--so far as the outward life is concerned--is hurry, money, noise, ostentation, snobbery, vulgarity, arrogance, discontent, envy.--H.S. CHAMBERLAIN, K.A., p. 60.

472. King Edward VII., while he was Prince of Wales, was often a guest of the London Savage Club, which is so "exclusive" that the Prince could not become a member.--O.A.H. SCHMITZ, D.W.D., p. 131.

473. Discipline within the parties is maintained with Draconian severity by the so-called "Whips" (i.e., _Peitschenschwingern_, lash-wielders); and woe to the member who should dare to express his own opinion!--H.S. CHAMBERLAIN, K.A., p. 17.

474. The English admit that, owing to the demoralizing influence of Edward VII., they are in a state of religious, social and economic decadence, but their illusion as to the incomparable superiority of England prevents them from tracing the evil to its true source, and as some one must be to blame for it, the fault must of course lie with the rapidly climbing Germany.--PROF. A. SCHROeER, Z.C.E., p. 34.

475. Every man wears the same trousers, every woman the same hat. I remember once being unable to find in all London a single blue necktie--blue was not the fashion. This would have been unthinkable in Berlin, Paris or Vienna.--H.S. CHAMBERLAIN, K.A., p. 18.

476. Thus science, which to us is a very serious matter, is to the Englishman, _like everything else_--except money-making!--like, for instance, politics, administration, the care of the poor, &c.,--_a private hobby, a sort of sport_.--PROF. A. SCHROeER, Z.C.E., p. 43.

477. On the day of the Oxford and Cambridge boat race, one walks, in the giant city of London, through literally empty (_buchstaeblich leere_) streets. From the oldest duchess to the youngest chimney sweep, all are seized with the same mad enthusiasm for this event.--H.S. CHAMBERLAIN, K.A., p. 18.

478. [Puritanism leads to] that shrinking from the frank expression of emotions which (for example) explains the fact that cultivated England reads its great poet Shakespeare for the most part in editions in which everything is deleted that could give offence to a sensitive old maid.--PROF. W. WUNDT, D.N.I.P., p. 32.

479. At the parliamentary elections [before the war] nothing is spoken of but the hatred for Germany, which animates the speaker and his audience.--K.L.A. SCHMIDT, D.E.E., p. 10.

480. [British ignorance is] so horrific that a German can scarcely conceive it. Five years ago, in a town of 40,000 inhabitants, it was impossible to find a single man, who, for payment, could read English correctly to an invalid.--H.S. CHAMBERLAIN, K.A., p. 18.

481. Attention has recently been drawn, by an authoritative writer, to the fact that English biology and the theory of evolution, which have achieved so much celebrity, are in essence nothing but the transference of liberal middle-class views to the processes of life seen in nature.--PROF. W. SOMBART, H.U.H., p. 17.

482. Is the noble land of Shakespeare fighting against us? Not at all; for Shakespeare we have long conquered. He has long been more a German than an English poet.--O.A.H. SCHMITZ, D.W.D., p. 15.

483. About the middle of the last century, England was in a fair way to save herself from decadence through the revivifying virtue of the philosophico-ethical influence of Germany.--PROF. A. SCHROeER, Z.C.E., p. 69.

484. England is incapable of producing a people's army (_Volksarmee_).[45]--H.S. CHAMBERLAIN, K.A., p. 50.

_See also Nos. 3, 146, 147, 174, 176, 178, 179._

=France.=

485. The English pirate-soul and French Chauvinism were bound to seek and find each other.--P. ROHRBACH, W.D.K., p. 14.

486. Beasts who spring upon us we can only treat as beasts, but the bestial hatred which impels them we must not allow to arise in us.--PROF. F. MEINECKE, D.D.E., p. 51.