GEORGE SAND’S PROPHECY.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXV, Issue 280, 24 November 1914, Page 4

GEORGE SAND’S PROPHECY.

A correspondent, writing to the Lontlon “Times,” says:—l have just been looking at the correspondence which passed between George Sand and Flaubert during and after the war of 1870. Perhaps you may think the following curious prophecy of Germany’s moral decay of some interest at the present moment. It was written by George Sand in September, 1871. It may be as well in these burned times to give it in a. free, but substantially accurate, English version:—‘‘The time is soon coming when we shall have as much cause to pity the German people fcr their victory as ourselves for our defeat. The German triumph is for Germany the lirst act of her moral dissolution. The tragedy of her fall has begun, and as she works at it

with her own hands it will proceed apace. All these great organisations which defy right, justice, and the sense of humanity are so many idols of day: it is our duty and our interest to realise it. That is the truth. But the moral downfall of Germany is not the future salvation of France, and if we are fated to do to her as she has done to ns, her ruin will not restore us our life. It is not in hlood that races can renew their youth. Streams of life may yet come from the corpse of France; the corpse of Germany will he a plague centre for all .Europe. There is no resurrection for a nation which has lost sight of the human ideal.” Those sentences occur in a very long letter which was printed at the time. They may then have seemed to many the mere emptiness of French rhetoric; hut to ns now, read in the light of the commentary afforded by 40 years’ of German intrigue, by Busch’s revelations of Bismarck, by Bernhardi’s gospel of force, and by bis pupils’ application of it at Louvain and elsewhere, do they not rather suggest the sad precision of unexaggerated truth?