I am a very bad example of the English temper; for the English temper
grumbles at all this, to the great relief of our enemies, who believe
that what a man admits against his own nation must be true. Our
pessimists, by indulging their natural vein, serve us, without reward,
quite as well as Germany is served by her wireless press. They deceive
the enemy.
Modern Germany has organized and regimented her people like an ant-hill
or a beehive. The people themselves, including many who belong to the
upper class, are often simple villagers in temper, full of kindness and
anger, much subject to envy and jealousy, not magnanimous, docile and
obedient to a fault. If they claimed, as individuals, to represent the
highest reach of European civilization, the claim would be merely
absurd. So they shift their ground, and pretend that society is greater
than man, and that by their painstaking organization their society has
been raised to the pinnacle of human greatness. They make this claim so
insistently, and in such obvious good faith, that some few weak tempers
and foolish minds in England have been impressed by it.
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