All these people have agreed to approve our treaties with Belgium, in spite of which twenty speakers scold each other with the greatest vehemence, as if each wished to make an end of the other; they are not agreed about the motives which make them unanimous, hence, alas! a regular German squabble about the Emperor's beard; _querelle d'Allemand_.

You Anglo-Saxon Yankees have something of the same kind also....

Your battles are bloody; ours wordy; these chatterers really cannot govern Prussia.

I must bring some opposition to bear against them; they have too little wit and too much self-complacency--stupid and audacious.

Stupid, in all its meanings, is not the right word; considered individually, these people are sometimes very clever, generally educated--the regulation German university culture; but of politics, beyond the interests of their own church tower, they know as little as we knew as students, and even less; as far as external politics go, they are also, taken separately, like children.