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Hotel-keepers especially look to the winning side, and do their very utmost to Germanise their establishments. Shopkeepers must live, and find it not only advantageous but necessary to follow the same course. Sad indeed is the spectacle of Germanised France! Nemesis here faces us in militarism, crushing the people with taxation and profoundly shocking the best instincts of humanity.
Yet it is to Germanise the world that Germany is waging war to-day that she may confer upon us the benefits of her own proved swinishness. There is nothing left for us but to fight for our souls like men. The last war! We believed that at first, but as the years dragged on the certainty became an optimism, the optimism a dream which we well-nigh knew to be impossible.
He used to say, “To make Poland dumb is to Germanise Poland.”92 The old man, who had prattled all through his life, now wished to repose amid prattle; silence awoke him from sleep: thus millers, lulled by the clatter of the wheels, as soon as the axles stop, awake crying in fright: “The Lord be with us!”93
It was a band of patriotic poets who first employed the language of the Magyars in their compositions. Hitherto all literary utterance had been confined to Latin, or to the foreign tongues spoken at courts. The rash attempt of Joseph II. to denationalise the Magyar and to Germanise Hungary by imperial edicts had a violent reactionary result.
But in the meantime something could have been effected in another way. The conquerors might partially Germanise London, but, on the other hand, if the thing were skilfully managed, the British element within the Empire might impress the mark of its influence on everything German.
And then followed the famous passage which formed part of the "evidence" quoted against him during his trial for high treason: "If Austria-Hungary continues her internal policy by centralising in order to be better able to germanise and preserve the German character of the State, if she does not resist all efforts for the creation of a customs and economic union with Germany, the Pan-German movement will prove fatal for her.
A Luther and Goethe may be the puppets pitted in a contest of culture against Maeterlinck and Victor Hugo. But it is Krupp and Zeppelin and the War-Lord that pull the strings. As Wilamowitz reminds us, it was the Roman legions, not Virgil and Horace, that stamped out the Celtic languages and romanised Western Europe. It is the German army, two thousand years later, that is to germanise it.
And as everything loves its symbol, so the German loves the clouds and all that is obscure, evolving, crepuscular, damp, and shrouded, it seems to him that everything uncertain, undeveloped, self-displacing, and growing is "deep". The German himself does not EXIST, he is BECOMING, he is "developing himself". "Development" is therefore the essentially German discovery and hit in the great domain of philosophical formulas, a ruling idea, which, together with German beer and German music, is labouring to Germanise all Europe.
Whether this was because they have mostly been content to Germanise, or because they have not been provided with sufficient individual talent, it is fortunately unnecessary for us to attempt to determine in this place and at this time.
And Germany having shown herself to be easily first of European States in her pedant-manufacturing machinery, all the assembled dominies of all the rest of the world exclaimed with one voice, "Go to! Let us Germanise our educational system!" Now, the German is an excellent workman in his way. Patient, laborious, conscientious, he has all the highest qualities of the ideal brick-maker.
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