British Vices—Hypocrisy, Envy and Greed.
415. England thinks the hour has come for our annihilation. Why does she want to annihilate us? Because she cannot forgive our strength, our industry, our prosperity! There is no other explanation![41]—Prof. A. v. Harnack, I.M., 1st October, 1914, p. 25.
416. No other people has misused its riches as England has. With a hypocritically virtuous air, the British Chauvinist has for years been labouring to undermine the German name, and few can have divined with what means he went to work.—"Germanus," B.U.D.K., p. 47.
417. We cannot expect our enemies to try to do us justice—though we can, after all, sympathetically understand almost all of them, with the sole exception of the English, in whom the transparently base abstractness of the calculating business spirit lies beneath the level of humanity, and is so positively immoral as to be entirely outside the scope of sympathy.—G. Misch, V.G.D.K., p. 8.
418. And then England! She does not, like France, send all her sons into the field, but sends specially enlisted troops. There lurks the impelling evil spirit, which has conjured up this war out of hell—the spirit of envy and the spirit of hypocrisy.—Prof. U. v. Wilamowitz-Möllendorf, R., pt. i., p. 7.
419. England is a Moloch that will devour everything, a vampire that will suck tribute from all the veins of the earth, a monster snake encircling the whole Equator.—"My German Fatherland," by Pastor Tolzien, quoted in H.A.H., p. 140.
420. In the last attempt at an Anglo-Saxon philosophy, Pragmatism, the test of truth became simply usefulness. It is true that most Englishmen turned against it. Why? Not because this view seemed to them false, but because they thought it inadvisable, and therefore sinful, to blurt out the secret.—O.A.H. Schmitz, D.W.D., p. 121.
421. An English poet has invented a symbol that may well be applied to his own country: The Picture of Dorian Grey. In the eyes of the world, the hypocritical sinner seems to be endowed with the gift of unfading youth and beauty; but only because he has at home a sedulously concealed portrait of magical properties. In this the vices plough their furrows; in this the features are gradually contorted into a grisly image of guilt; until the day of judgment—the day of self-judgment.—Prof. U. v. Wilamowitz-Möllendorf, R., pt. iv., p. 16.
422. Oscar Wilde once wrote an essay on The Art of Lying, and his countrymen have since carried this art to a high perfection.—H. S. Chamberlain, K.A., p. 10.
422a. Another vice has been developed to its highest pitch in this war: to wit, lying. England in particular has established a record in this department, even as against the Father of Lies, the Devil.—Prof. F. Delitzsch, D.R.S.Z., No. 13, p. 20.
422b. Never since human Kultur has existed has such a deluge of lies and slanders, of fraud and hypocrisy, been poured forth as ... "pious" England has spread abroad in the name of the triune Christian God. And this shameless hypocrisy must appear all the more revolting, since every one who is at all behind the scenes knows that this British Christian God is in truth the Bank of England, the sacred "Golden Calf," the idolatrous worship of which is the chief aim of Pambritismus, the lordship of England over all other peoples.—Prof. E. Haeckel, E.W., p. 59.
423. We must be wroth, and we will be wroth, with the whole power of our inner man. We will hate the will of the nation which has so basely set upon our peace-loving people in order to destroy us. We will hate the Satanic powers of arrogance and selfishness, of treachery and cruelty, of lying and hypocrisy. We will fight without scruple, and employ all means of destruction, however terrible they may be. We cannot do otherwise; but we do not hate the individual human beings.... The true, beneficent hatred applies to things, not persons.—The Fifth Petition in the Lord's Prayer and England, by Pastor J. Lahusen, quoted in H.A.H., p. 162.
423a. The curse of millions of hapless people falls on the head of the British island kingdom, whose boundless national egoism knows no other goal than the extension of British rule over the whole planet, the exploitation of all other nations to its own benefit, and the filling of its insatiable purse with the gold of all other peoples.—Prof. E. Haeckel, quoted by P. Heinsick, W.U.G., p. 4.
424. It is an almost sinister self-contradiction: the individual Englishman, in private life, is by no means devoid of a certain outward decency, perhaps because he thinks it pays: but the public morals of England do not shrink from any baseness.—Prof. G. Roethe, D.R.S.Z., No. 1, p. 14.
425. It is certain that it was in England that humanity first fell sick of the huckster view of the world. But the English ailment had spread further, and above all it had already begun to attack the body of even the German people.—Prof. W. Sombart, H.U.H., p. 99.
425a. Covetousness, a huckstering spirit, a thirst for gain, calculating envy, hypocrisy—what despicable vices have they not become to us. We spit at them, we hate them, just because they are British.... Now we walk in gentle innocence through homely pastures, free from greed of money, stripped of all cunning, because—just because it is all British.—Pastor D. Vorwerk, quoted in H.A.H., p. 39.
426. The much-lauded missionary spirit was only a business enterprise, by means of which John Bull filled his purse.—"The Christianity of the Belligerent Nations," by Pastor Erdmann, quoted in H.A.H., p. 146.
427. England avers that she makes war against us without hatred, and thinks she is thereby giving proof of high civilization. It is precisely the proof of her cold-hearted baseness.... The self-controlled English gentleman, who makes unemotional war out of commercial envy, is more devilish than the Cossack. He stands to the Frenchman in the relation of the sneaking murderer for gain to the murderer from passion. The gentleman-burglar of Conan Doyle expresses the soul of the nation.—O.A.H. Schmitz, D.W.D., p. 15.
428. A nice protector of outraged national rights!!! Thus Richard, Duke of Gloucester, appears with prayer-book and rosary on the terrace of the castle, thus Mephistopheles dons the mask of lawyer and philosopher, thus Iscariot kisses the Saviour.—"My German Fatherland," by Pastor Tolzien, quoted in H.A.H., p. 142.
429. Never has the mass-misery of war ... presented itself to us in such grisly shapes as in this terrible world-war, which has been forced upon us solely by the commercial envy and the brutal egoism of the Christian model-state, England.—Prof. E. Haeckel, E.W., p. 27.