All this, of course, is systematic propaganda carried out with characteristic thoroughness and, be it added, clumsiness. For even among the Germans it failed in many cases to carry conviction. I remonstrated with my Fräulein--herself a school teacher: “How can you bring your children up on this wretched stuff; with a country like yours so rich in history and legend, surely there is something more inspiring to teach than this nonsense about cows and sweated workers?” Fräulein shrugged her shoulders. The ferment of the revolution was working in her naturally liberal mind, and the unaccustomed liberty of thought and action which the revolution had brought in its wake moved her not a little. But she found it difficult to part with the sheet anchors of the past, and respect for the Imperial family was screwed very tightly into the average professional German. She admitted the stories were stupid, but said that the Kaiser was the symbol of Germany’s greatness and they had always been taught to revere him. Since the revolution the Social Democrats have made an end of Kaiser worship in the schools. Pictures and portraits have vanished. All totems of the faith have disappeared. Apparently the children were very much upset when they were first forbidden to sing hymns to the Kaiser. There were tears when the portraits were removed. The German mind, naturally docile, yearns for some concrete expression of faith to which it can rally. Of all fields schools offer the greatest scope to the corrupting influence of propaganda. And through the schools Imperial Germany twisted and distorted the spirit of the people with consequences no less dire to themselves than to the rest of the world. One of the irritating facts about Germany to-day is that she refuses to say she is sorry. We English are outraged by the fact that no sense of guilt or of moral responsibility appears to have touched the spirit of the people. It is not a question of dragging Germany about in a white sheet and a candle from shrine to shrine, but of some guarantee that there shall be no repetition of events so lamentable. The best guarantee for the future is a clear recognition of what was wrong in the past. Truth permeates very slowly through German mentality, and few Germans seem to realise that they or their rulers have brought the world to the very brink of ruin; that millions of lives have perished as the result of their insensate ambitions. They are conscious, painfully conscious of the miseries of Germany to-day. But that civilisation as a whole is staggering under the blow they dealt it--this aspect of the situation apparently never strikes them. Facts which jump to our eyes as English people make no more impression on them than they would on a blind man. Over and over again I have been baffled by coming up against a blank wall of non-comprehension as regards circumstances about which there is no dispute.