Page:A personal letter to the Kaiser.pdf/3

 Serbia couldn't possibly accept it; it was meant to start trouble. They still believe and always will believe that you could have held Austria off if you had wanted to; they think that if you had known that England was going to enter the war you would have held her off. And so they blame you, Wilhelm; you got off on the wrong foot with them at the start.

I partly agree with them, but I go back a little farther than they do. I realize the position you were in. There you were with a population that was outgrowing your country. Bismarck never believed in colonies, and shut you off from getting any good ones when the good ones were being given out. And when you did get around to it, all that was left was a few swamps in Africa—everywhere else you looked in the East you found England quietly intrenched; and over here, behind the Monroe Doctrine, were we. You've had diplomatic setbacks right along ever since the Congress of Berlin. Two or three times you've "rattled your shining sword," but each time the Powers have stepped in and made you back down. It just looked to you as if the only way you could get a "place in the sun" was to fight for it. And you thought that 1914 was the time. You were ready; and every year France and Russia were getting readier; every day that passed made you comparatively weaker; 1914 was your year.

But that is past and gone. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life hating you because you started the war. And the best thing you and I can do is not to discuss it.

I'm going to pass over all this stuff about Kultur, too. Some of our fellows over here have taken that very seriously, but I haven't. When your professors and preachers and you yourself talk about Germany's Kultur, about her divine mission to spread her superior brand of civilization over the world, I just laugh. Because I have heard a hundred freshly picked college graduates talk just exactly like that. Every boy who comes out of college, if he amounts to anything, has a deep-seated conviction that the world is pretty much wrong and that he is peculiarly set apart to put it right. It's because Germany is just a college graduate among the nations that she talks like that—just a vigorous, lusty youngster who has studied a little too hard and not played football quite enough. When Germany is older, she will understand that every nation feels itself divinely ordained to perform a mission in the world; she will know that the highest Kultur belongs to that nation which boasts the broadest tolerance. There never was a nation so insignificant or so debased that its people, deep down in their hearts, didn't believe they were a bit better than any other people in the world. The most civilized nation is that one which, without forfeiting its own self-esteem, is quite happy to allow every other nation the same comforting illusion.

When I was a boy ten years old. Wilhelm, each of the families