France.

485. The English pirate-soul and French Chauvinism were bound to seek and find each other.—P. Rohrbach, W.D.K., p. 14.

486. Beasts who spring upon us we can only treat as beasts, but the bestial hatred which impels them we must not allow to arise in us.—Prof. F. Meinecke, D.D.E., p. 51.

487. At no former time could the French soldier be reproached with cowardice.... If his present conduct is so far beneath his reputation ... it is because he lacks the stimulus of enthusiasm, because he knows that it is not his country that is sending him forth to battle, but only an ambitious and short-sighted Government, because he is conscious that he is not fighting for a great and noble cause, but for a mean and dirty one.—W. Helm, W.W.S.M., p. 11.

488. For honour's sake another hundred thousand men may be sacrificed, but there must be an end to that. Then it is all over with France as a great Power.... These men [the French Ministry] or others like them must make peace! Some one must make it, for the bloodshed cannot go on forever. But what sort of a peace will it be? Væ victis! Not till now has Bismarck's victory been complete.—F. Naumann, Member of the Reichstag, D.U.F., p. 8.

489. We will do well to leave to France the outward boundaries of a great Power, if only that we may not figure as the tyrants of Europe.—P. Rohrbach, W.D.K., p. 28.

490. The defeat which France is now suffering is only the expiation of guilt which is already a century old.... The twenty years of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had left the French a mere set of individuals who care nothing for the maintenance of their race: æsthetes and dandies, money-grubbers and Bohemians.—K. Engelbrecht, D.D.D.K., p. 51.

491. [As to the origin of the war] the French, as England's trusty henchmen, obediently repeat what England tells them. If Don Quixote rides at the windmills, Sancho Panza must keep pace with him.—Prof. W.V. Blume, D.D.M., p. 11.