His
name was Professor Otto von Gierke of the University of Berlin. I
gathered from his conversation that he and his family had been very
kindly entertained in London. His manner was somewhat harsh and
over-bearing, but his white hair and spectacles gave him a venerable
aspect, and it was clear that he and his wife and daughter belonged to a
cultivated and intelligent _milieu_. But who among his English hosts
could possibly have imagined the thoughts and ideas in that grey head? I
find a speech of his in a most illuminating book by a Danish professor
on German Chauvinist literature. [_Hurrah and Hallelujah!_ By J. P.
Bang, D.D., Professor of Theology at the University of Copenhagen,
translated by Jessie Broechner.] The speech was published in a collection
called _German Speeches in Hard Times_, which contains names once so
distinguished as those of Von Wilamovitz and Harnack.
Professor von Gierke's effusion begins with the usual German falsehoods
as to the origin of the war, and then continues--"But now that we
Germans are plunged in war, we will have it in _all its grandeur and
violence_! Neither fear nor _pity_ shall stay our arm before it has
completely brought our enemies to the ground.
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