Page:The Dedication of Germanic Museum of Harvard University p23.jpg

Rh been precipitated by some unfortunate accident. And then it turned out that there had never been the slightest reason for all this blustering choler, and that, if the sentiment that “blood is thicker than water” had more vigorously asserted itself, the senselessness of the whole turmoil would easily have become apparent at the beginning.

When Americans and Englishmen enumerate the things which they have in common and which sentimentally should bind them together, they seldom omit to mention by the side of the common law and their common principles of civil liberty and so on, their common Shakespeare. Now it is a significant fact that this common Shakespeare is in spite of the difference of language, more alive in Germany, not only than in France or in any Latin or any non-Germanic country, but more alive in Germany than in England or America; that Shakespeare is in Germany not only as generally, or even more generally, read as reproduced in excellent translations, but is far more frequently presented on the stage, because far more in demand by the German public. In fact, there is hardly a respectable theatre which does not carry several of Shakespeare's dramas on its regular repertoire, to be offered not by way of “revival,” or spectacular novelty, but as a matter of course, without which the institution would lose its character, and the omission of which the theatre-going public would resent. Thus the common Shakespeare is emphatically claimed by Germany as her own, while in non-Germanic countries in spite of occasional efforts to introduce him he hardly figures as anything more than an imperfectly intelligible foreign curiosity.

To my mind there is nothing more abominable, nothing more hideous, nothing more criminal, than the reckless goading of nation against nation for the purpose of disturbing their friendship and peaceful intercourse. It is a crime so infamous that it should put anyone guilty of it outside of the social pale of civilized mankind. On the other hand nothing can be more honorable and blessed than any effort to create and nourish a public spirit abhorring the resort to war, except in case of the most absolute and extreme necessity, a sentiment inspiring a statesmanship bent upon devoting in international policy the keenness of its eye to