German Impressions Preface The following pages are not an essay. I have made no attempt at unity or literary form. They are also by no means a unified estimate of present conditions in Germany. Anything of the kind would be entirely beyond my powers. What I have tried to do is to set down some of the more striking things that were said to me while I was in Germany, such comments on these remarks as seem to me probably sound, and a very few general conclusions of my own. I believe that the principal defects of what I have to report and to say arise from the fact that I had no opportunity to talk with people who represent more or less the opposite type to the intellectual: I mean hard-headed, unimaginative but shrewd and competent men of affairs who have few beliefs about what is good or bad politically but are chiefly concerned for the effective running of things in the present and near future. I suspect that the opinions of such men would often be very different from those of my informants, and not less significant. |