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I have been interesting and exasperating myself, during a most untimely illness,[2] by working through a part of the literature of German Imperial Expansion. I know that it is only a part, and yet when I look at this array -- Treitschke and Bernhardi, Schiemann and Hasse, Bley, Sybel, "Gross-Deutschland" and "Germania Triumphans" -- it represents a considerable body of thought. And it is the literature of the devil. Not one kindly sentiment, not one generous expression, is to be found within it. It is informed with passionate cupidity for the writer's country and unreasoning, indiscriminate hatred and jealousy towards everything outside it -- above all, towards the British Empire. How could such a literature fail to bring about a world-coalition against the country which produced it! Were there no Germans who foresaw so obvious a result? The whole tendency of the doctrine is that Germany should, artichoke fashion, dismember the world. Not a word is said as to the world suddenly turning and dismembering her. But was not that the only protection against such monstrous teaching as these books contain?
[2] September 10, 1914.