Note 63 — Chapter V · PATRIOTISM AND POWER IN WAR AND PEACE
Reading edition
Mr Hartley Manners, the playwright, who produced during the War a book entitled Hate with a Will to Victory, writes thus:—
‘And in voicing our doctrine of Hate let us not forget that the German people were, and are still, solidly behind him (the Kaiser) in everything he does.’ ...
‘The German people are actively and passively with their Government to the last man and the last mark. No people receive their faith and their rules of conduct more fatuously from their rulers than do the German people. Fronting the world they stand as one with their beloved Kaiser. He who builds on a revolution in Germany as a possible ending of the war, knows not what he says. They will follow through any degradation of the body, through any torture of spirit, the tyrants they have been taught from infancy to regard as their Supreme Masters of body and soul.’ ...
And here is his picture of ‘the German’:—
... ‘a slave from birth, with no rights as a free man, owing allegiance to a militaristic Government to whom he looks for his very life; crushed by taxation to keep up the military machine; ill-nourished, ignorant, prone to crime in greater measure than the peasants of any other country—as the German statistics of crime show—a degraded peasant, a wretched future, and a loathesome past—these are the inheritances to which the German peasant is born. What type of nature can develop in such conditions? But one—the brute. And the four years’ commerce of this War has shown the German from prince to peasant as offspring of the one family—the brute family.’ ...