These admirable principles which may never be put wholly into practice, but toward which we must try to grow always nearer, are the expression of the deepest human generosity. They are the radical negation of brutal and primitive force; they incline the world toward a unanimous and serene peace. They have based on faith the infinite perfectibility of conscience. Only a nation of a high degree of civilization can conceive of relations so perfect between human beings and cherish dreams so great. Germany was never capable of this. The individual German is the least subtle and the least susceptible to education of any in the world. It has been my lot to take part in certain European capitals in a number of reunions where English, French, Italians, and Germans came together and conversed. They were all, I was assured, distinguished people, of whom their respective nations might be proud. Now, the German was rarely to be seen in an excellent attitude. He was at once embarrassed and arrogant. He lacked refinement. His politeness was clumsy. He was as though afraid of seeming not to know everything. The most eccentric taste seemed to him the best taste. To him to be up to date was to be up to the minute. He would have been wretched if any one in his presence had claimed to be up to the second. As soon as he had the chance to speak and got a hearing, he inaugurated, as it were, a course of lectures. Clearness was not at all necessary to him. One rarely understood precisely what he meant. The fastidiousness and subtlety which led others to seek perfection in phrase and thought had little attraction for him. With what heaviness the German diplomat discusses matters at the council table! With what clumsiness the German conqueror plants himself in a conquered country! While France, at the end of half a century, makes herself beloved in Savoy, at Mentone, and at Nice, while in the space of two centuries she assimilates Lille and Dunkirk and Strasburg and Alsace; while England in a few decades unites to her Egypt and the Cape, Germany remains detested in Poland, Schleswig, and in Alsace-Lorraine. Germany is essentially the persona ingrata everywhere it presents itself. It knows only the methods that divide, and not those which unite. Germany makes proclamations that act upon the mind as the frost acts upon plants. Germany knows neither how to attract nor how to charm nor how to civilize, because she has no personal and profound moral force. Europe under the successive spiritual hegemonies of Athens, Rome, and Paris remained the most admirable centre of human development that has ever been. Under German hegemony Europe would move toward a sort of gloomy and hard organization under which everything would be impeccable, arranged only because everything would be tyrannized over from above.