The German people have substantially none of those preconceptions of independence and self-direction to go on, in the absence of which an effectual revulsion against dynastic rule can not come to pass.
Embedded in the common sense of the British population at large is a certain large and somewhat sullen sense of fair dealing.

In this they are not greatly different from their neighbours, if at all, except that the body of common sense in which this British sense of fair dealing lies embedded is a maturer fashion of common sense than that which serves to guide the workday life of many of their neighbours.

And the maturity in question appears to be chiefly a matter of their having unlearned, divested themselves of, or been by force of disuse divested of, an exceptionally large proportion of that burden of untoward conceits which western Europe, and more particularly middle Europe, at large has carried over from the Middle Ages.

They have had time and occasion to forget more of what the exigencies of modern life make it expedient to have forgotten.

And yet they are reputed slow, conservative.