You punish some of the most dangerous criminals by indeterminate sentences, which frequently end after a year’s imprisonment, but you expect to hold the German people in financial bondage for more than a generation to come because of the criminal blunders of less than a hundred individuals.
I was blinded by material factors at the time of my seeming triumphs but now I can see some of the things which will never come to pass. The French and the English are repeating some of the blunders I made fifty years ago. They are counting on conditions which will never exist, like a bird sitting on a nest of mixed eggs from which the cuckoo will eventually oust all the other birds.
French people are under the illusion that Russia will meet the obligations undertaken by the late Czar. To expect such a thing shows the child-like illusions under which French fanatics are living. They are still wrapped in the swaddling clothes of politics.
We committed crimes that have brought civilization to the brink of chaos, but we are not capable of such naivete.
The logic of a Frenchman is no better than the mysticism of a Russian or the sentimentality of an Englishman. French people learned nothing from the blunders of Napoleon III and the debacle of Sedan. And the reason? They have remained provincial while the Germans imitated the commercial cosmopolitanism of the English.
Advice is the cheapest of all things. Nevertheless, I advise your statesmen to place no reliance on sentimental contracts written on paper foredoomed to become “scraps.”
I do not hesitate to declare that no agreement signed since 1913 is worth more than the seals. In Europe, leaders and rulers have passed from an international game of chess to a national gamble with marked cards.
You have now to deal with an element which did not exist in my time. This element embraces all factions of the new radicalism, no matter in what country or under what leader. Some of these elements may unite, but they are not going to change. How, then, can you undertake to insure the future by contracts signed and sealed by elderly gentlemen with good intentions and poor judgment?
The war gave the new factions the long wished-for opportunity. They seized it in Russia, in Germany, in Poland, in Britain, and other countries. But the opportunities created by the war are one thing, the opportunities of tomorrow will be different, and it is this contingency for which your leaders are not prepared. You will have to select men of vision who will judge events as they arrive, without regard to the distant future, which belongs to no man.
One of my greatest mistakes was in separating Protestant Prussia from the interests of the Catholics of South Germany.