The Germans have shown themselves strong in their unity, and strong in their willingness to make great sacrifices to preserve that unity. No one can deny nobility to the sacrifice made by the simple-minded German soldier who dies fighting bravely for his people and his creed. His narrowness is his strength, and makes unselfishness easier by saving his mind from question. 'This one thing you shall do', his country says to him, 'fight and die for your country, so that your country and your people shall have lordship over other countries and other peoples. You are nothing; Germany is everything.' We who live in this island love our country with at least as deep a passion; but a creed so simple as the German creed will never do for us. We are patriotic, but our patriotism is often overlaid and confused by a wider thought and a wider sympathy than the Germans have ever known. Much extravagant praise has lately been given to the German power of thinking, which produces the elaborate marvels of German organization. But this thinking is slave-thinking, not master-thinking; it spends itself wholly on devising complicated means to achieve a very simple end. That is what makes the Germans so like the animals. Their wisdom is all cunning. I have had German friends, two or three, in the course of my life, but none of them ever understood a word that I said if I tried to say what I thought. You could talk to them about food, and they responded easily. It was all very restful and pleasant, like talking to an intelligent dog. If each of the allied nations were devoted to the creed of nationalism, the alliance could not endure. We depend for our strength on what we hold in common. The weakness of this wider creed is that it makes no such immediate and strong appeal to the natural instincts as is made by the mother-country. It demands the habitual exercise of reason and imagination. Further, seeing that we are infinitely less tame and less docile than the Germans, we depend for our strength on informing and convincing our people, and on obtaining agreement among them. Questions which in Germany are discussed only in the gloomy Berlin head-quarters of the General Staff are discussed here in the newspapers. In the press, even under the censorship, we think aloud. It records our differences and debates our policy. You could not suppress these differences and these debates without damaging our cause. There is no freedom worth having which does not, sooner or later, include the freedom to say what you think.