Once in Berlin I went to a sitting of the Archaeologische Gesellschaft, 3 March 1896. It was all plain living and high thinking there, and they debated Pheidias and Plato amidst great bursts of Wagner that came in from a concert-hall close by. I have a letter here that I wrote my brother next day--“They manage their meetings in a much more formal way than the people at the Institut at Paris; and they are more long-winded. One of the men last night got his notes in such a muddle that he made nearly all his statements three times over; but nobody seemed to mind.” In my next letter, Dresden, 10 March 1896, I said that I had been to call on Fleckeisen, and described him as “an old man with long white hair, toddling about his study in a dressing-gown.” I regret to see that in another letter I spoke of a society of learned men as “a cellar-ful of beer-barrels.” Amongst the learned Germans whom I used to meet, some few talked politics quite freely; and I used to hear that everything that Bismarck did was right, and everything that the young Emperor did was wrong. I should like to hear what they are saying about the causes of this War. I remember the abdication of the Emperor of the French in 1870; and now in 1918, at the abdication of the German Emperor, the feeling of relief is just the same. Both men had kept all Europe in alarm for years before their fall. In turn they had the greatest army on the Continent and a navy that was second to our own; and no one could foresee how they would use their strength, as their foreign policy was all adventure and sensation. There was very little sympathy with France at the disaster of Sedan. It is the fashion now to talk as if we sympathised with France all through. My recollection is that people were mostly against France in 1870 until Paris was besieged: then they realized that Germany was getting dangerous, and began to change their views.