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258
SWEDEN IN 1914 [chap. xv.
of Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen. German managers and
clerks in ever increasing numbers came to establish
themselves in Stockholm or Gothenburg; very soon
German was the foreign tongue which was the
most often understood and spoken in Sweden—
though this is not saying much, for the Swede does not
care about speaking any but his mother-tongue. But
the Germans, on the contrary, learnt the Scandinavian
languages quickly, and this was another trump-card in
their game. Very soon, assisted by political sympathies,
the German academic’programme was integrally adopted
in Sweden, and this definitely accentuated the
drawing-nearer of the two countries.
People have often been surprised that all this work
should have been done in Sweden, in spite of the fact
that the country had at its head a French dynasty—and
French only recently. To that we would reply that the
influence of race over the sympathies and capabilites of
sovereigns has always been greatly exaggerated. It is
not blood, it is environment, education, climate, soil, the
air they breathe, ideas and ways of thinking, assimilated
almost mechanically, and unconsciously, that in the long
run constitute the intellectual and moral physiognomy—
I would even say the physical physiognomy—of families
and individuals. Examine, for instance, the sixteen
quar-terings of the late Emperor of Russia, Alexander III.
There are fifteen German quarterings and one half-Russian
one—which, moreover, is absolutely hypothetical—the
one that represents the unfortunate Peter III., the
miserable scion of the once powerful Romanoff race.
Well! there has never been a Russian, a Russian
sovereign, so typically Russian as Alexander III. It was
almost as if the former Tsar of Moscow, a John III. or an
Alexis Mikhai’lovitch, were re-incarnated in his person.
He was far more like a rich starovere merchant of the
Volga than a St. Petersburg aristocrat; and his aversion
for everything German, and particularly for anything
to do with Berlin, was absolutely sincere and only
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