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.