Do you think that we would carry on our militarism and our expensive drilling if we lived on an island as you do? We would not think of it. We would speedily dispatch a blood-thirsty butcher, like your Lord Kitchener, from our island to our most unhealthy colony. We could not even reconcile our worthy Dr. Karl Peters, who had dealt a little unscrupulously with a few negro women, with our conceptions of culture, and had to pass him over to you! But the thought shall not come to me or to us, as it does to your Prime Ministers, to pose as angels of light, a fact about which you have yourself told your compatriots the bitter truth to our great joy. We admit having injured Belgium's neutrality, but we have only done it because of dire necessity, because we could not otherwise reach France and take up the fight against two sides forced upon us. Belgium's independence and freedom, which is suddenly of the utmost importance to your King and your Ministers, we have not touched. Even after the expeditious capture of Liége we asked Belgium for the second time: "Let us pass quickly through your country. We will make good every damage, and will not take away a square foot of your country! Do destroyers of liberty and Huns and vandals, or whatever other defamatory names your English papers now heap upon us, who at the time of Beethoven and Schopenhauer formed the Areopagus of culture, conduct themselves in such a way? Does not one of your living spirits in England cry aloud at the reprehensible alliance which your Government has made over your heads with Russia and Japan? On the most shameful day in English history, on the day when Mongolian Japan gave the German people her ultimatum at the instigation of your politicians, on this, I repeat it, most shameful day in the entire English history, I believed that the great dead in Westminster Abbey would rise from their graves horrified at the shameful deed which their grandsons and great-grandsons imposed upon old England. *The Land of Shakespeare.* We Germans venerated the old England almost as a fatherland. We have recognized, understood, and studied Shakespeare, whom you, Bernard Shaw, so dislike, more than any other people, even more than the English nation itself. Lord Byron received more benefits from Goethe alone than from all of England put together. Newton, Darwin, and Adam Smith found in Germany their best supporters and interpreters. The dramatic writers of latter-day England, most worthy of mention, from Oscar Wilde to you, Galsworthy and Knoblauch, are recognized by us and their plays performed numberless times. We have always endeavored to understand the English character. "Nowhere did we feel so much at home as in Germany," all your compatriots will tell you who have been guests here.