He may—pardon the argot—get "one in the eye."
And Punch, Herr Professor, whose point seldom misses,
Is ready if needful to play the Ulysses.
The attempt to represent Bismarck as a professor might not seem to show a very acute reading of the facts were it not that German professors proved the chief inflamers of militarism. It must be added that, as a set off to this expostulation, Punch indited a remarkably genial poem to Bismarck a couple of weeks later on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. But this can hardly have atoned for the extremely acid and acute satire on the Spirit of German Colonization published about the same time. Here Germania declares her intentions to the native races in language which the treatment of the Herreros in German South-West Africa proved to be well within the mark:—
I haf brought you German culture for the poddy and the mind,
Die erhabene Kultur of efery sort and efery kind;
All the pessimistic dogtrines of the Schopenhauer school
And the blessings of a bureaucratish-military rule.
I shall teach you shplendit knowledge, vot you hitherto haf lacked,
That religion is a fantasy, vhilst sausage is a fact;