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.