"As for our Kaiser, whom you regard as a crafty and ambitious tyrant, he appears in our view as the incarnation of patriotic duty, burdened though not overwhelmed by care--a lover of peace, so long as peace may be had with honour and safety; but if this may not be, then a stern, though reluctant, drawer of the sword. It is true that the Kaiser's government is in many important respects a purely personal government. His is the ultimate responsibility for high policy. He fulfils the function in our system of that strong central power, without which the most ingeniously constructed organisation is but impotence. [Sidenote: GERMAN SELF-KNOWLEDGE] "The German people are ahead of the English and the Americans in self-knowledge; for they realise that there are many things appertaining to government, which cannot be discussed in the newspapers, or on the platform, any more than the policy and conduct of a great business can be made known in advance to the staff, and to trade competitors all over the world. And so, believing the Kaiser's government to be honest, capable, and devoted to the public weal, the German people trust it without reservation to decide when action shall be taken in a variety of spheres. "This system of ours which is founded in reason, and in experience of modern conditions, and which {156} is upheld by the unfaltering confidence of a great people, you are wont to condemn as tyrannical and reactionary. But can democracy stand against it?--Democracy infirm of purpose, jealous, grudging, timid, changeable, unthorough, unready, without foresight, obscure in its aims, blundering along in an age of lucidity guided only by a faltering and confused instinct! Given anything like an equal contest, is it conceivable that such an undisciplined chaos can prevail against the Hohenzollern Empire? "Of late your newspapers have been busily complaining of what they call 'German lies,' 'boastfulness,' and 'vulgar abuse.' They have taunted our government with not daring to trust the people. Our Headquarters bulletins have been vigorously taken to task by the Allies on these and other grounds. "But all nations will acclaim their victories louder than they will trumpet their defeats. This is in human nature. No official communiqué will ever be a perfect mirror of truth. It will never give the whole picture, but only a part; and by giving only a part it will often mislead. Were we to believe literally what the various governments have hitherto given out as regards their respective advances, the Germans by this time might perhaps have been at Moscow in the East and somewhere about the Azores in the West. But by the same token the Russians should have been on the Rhine and the French and English Allies at Berlin.