In short, both in the most scientific and in the most casual
sense of the word, he does not know what it is to have a _temper_. He does
not bend and fly back like steel; he sticks out, like wood. In this he
differs from any nation I have known, from your nation and mine, from the
French, the Spanish, the Scotch, the Welsh and the Irish. Bad luck never
braces him as it does us. Good luck never frightens him as it does us. It
can be seen in what the French call Chauvinism and we call Jingoism. For us
it is fireworks; for him it is daylight. On Mafeking Night, celebrating a
small but picturesque success against the Boers, nearly everybody in London
came out waving little flags. Nearly everybody in London is now heartily
ashamed of it. But it would never occur to the Prussians not to ride their
high horses with the freshest insolence for the far-off victory of Sedan;
though on that very anniversary the star of their fate had turned scornful
in the sky, and Von Kluck was in retreat from Paris. Above all, the
Prussian does not feel annoyed, as I do, when foreigners praise his country
for all the wrong reasons.
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