Charles Francis Adams, disturbed by this very question, undertook to examine it.
"Suspecting in my own case (that I did not think like a German) I have of late confined my reading on this topic almost exclusively to German sources. I have been taking a course on Nietzsche and Treitschke, as also in the German "Denkschrift," illumined by excerpts from the German papers in this country and the official utterances of Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg. The result has been most disastrous. It has utterly destroyed my capacity for judicial consideration. I can only say that if what I find in those sources is a capacity to think Germanically, I would rather cease thinking at all. It is the absolute negation of everything which in the past tended to the elevation of mankind, and the installation in place thereof of a system of thorough dishonesty, emphasized by brutal stupidity. There is a low cunning about it, too, which is to me in the last degree repulsive."
Germanism was born ages ago, its growth has been proceeding for centuries, and it has now reached an advanced stage of flowering. Hitler is but a bud indicative of what kind of "flower"
—82—
