To me Prince Hermann was perfectly courteous. He had made English
friends on his travels; he preferred English comrades in adventure to any
other: thought our East Indian empire the most marvellous thing the world
had seen, and our Indian Government cigars very smokeable upon
acquaintance. When stirred, he bubbled with anecdote. 'Not been there,'
was his reply to the margravine's tentatives for gossip of this and that
of the German Courts. His museum, hunting, and the Opera absorbed and
divided his hours. I guessed his age to be mounting forty. He seemed
robust; he ate vigorously. Drinking he conscientiously performed as an
accompanying duty, and was flushed after dinner, burning for tobacco and
a couch for his length. Then he talked of the littleness of Europe and
the greatness of Germany; logical postulates fell in collapse before him.
America to America, North and South; India to Europe. India was for the
land with the largest sea-board. Mistress of the Baltic, of the North
Sea and the East, as eventually she must be, Germany would claim to take
India as a matter of course, and find an outlet for the energies of the
most prolific and the toughest of the races of mankind,--the purest, in
fact, the only true race, properly so called, out of India, to which it
would return as to its source, and there create an empire magnificent in
force and solidity, the actual wedding of East and West; an empire firm
on the ground and in the blood of the people, instead of an empire of
aliens, that would bear comparison to a finely fretted cotton-hung
palanquin balanced on an elephant's back, all depending on the docility
of the elephant (his description of Great Britain's Indian Empire).
'And mind me,' he said, 'the masses of India are in character elephant
all over, tail to proboscis! servile till they trample you, and not so
stupid as they look. But you've done wonders in India, and we can't
forget it. Your administration of Justice is worth all your battles
there.'