The Spectator

The Spectator at war: A ‘psycho-political’ study of the English

‘The Magazines’, from The Spectator, 5 September 1914:

THE most interesting paper in the new Nineteenth Century is that by Sir Harry Johnston on “The German War and its Consequences.” Writing as one with many German friends, he sets forth the reasons why his love for Germany has changed to righteous anger. They are, briefly, that Germany, ruled by the Hohenzollerns and inflamed by Prussian Professors, though Great Britain and France had made all reasonable concessions to her colonial and commercial aspirations, has, on the pretext of the Austro-Servian quarrel, violated the neutrality of an unoffending country and conducted the war in Belgium and France with a barbarity hitherto associated with Oriental savages. Sir Harry Johnston maintains that it is the middle class throughout the United Kingdom that will suffer most from the terrible ambition that has maddened the German people, and caused them to force on us a war which we could not avoid without descending to the rank of a second-rate Power.

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