Twenty years of absence, and an intense longing for your home, glorified the Fatherland in your eyes.

You come back and find a country whose historical development has taken a totally different turn in the meantime, and the plain reality in nowise corresponds to the poetical picture you had painted for yourself.

Naturally you are painfully disappointed.

I know that of old from my own father.

But may I venture to remark that your criticism is hard, and perhaps not altogether well founded?
A system of government passes--the people remain.