original kinship, and the continuity of that kinship, in its various developments and manifestations.
Professor Kuno Francke, to whose personal efforts the first organization and the rapid growth of this enterprise owe so much, has very properly emphasized the fact that “this institution is not a German Museum, but a Germanic Museum,” which is “to bring together representative monuments of the Germanic past on English, Dutch, Scandinavian, Swiss and Austrian soil as well as German.”
Professor Francke has also so cogently set forth how scholars and students may profit from the opportunities for ocular observation afforded by such a museum that nothing need be added to his remarks on that part of the subject. Permit me, then, to devote a few words to another, what I might call the sentimental aspect of it, with especial reference to its effect upon the international intercourse between the peoples concerned.
I am well aware that international relations are not determined by sentiment alone but mainly by interest and impulses of a different kind. In our own history we have had very striking experiences of the sentiment of consanguinity utterly failing to prevent family quarrels; and everybody knows that family quarrels once well started have been apt to be peculiarly fierce. But it would be wrong to assume that sentiment, and especially that of blood-relationship, may not have a very beneficent influence upon the intercourse of kindred peoples at all. To be sure, it will not entirely overrule the antagonism of interests, but it may create a feeling of reluctance to carry these antagonisms to extremes—a feeling favorable to the exertion of every possible effort to bring them to a friendly adjustment.
When, for instance, we contemplate the present American feeling towards England, it will strike us that the often-expressed sentiment that “blood is thicker than water,” already referred to by Baron Bussche, has of late acquired a real significance, which in case of a threatening clash of interests may, not indeed induce either party to forget, or to take an entirely different view of those interests, but at least powerfully stimulate on both sides the wish not to permit such a clash to degenerate into actual hostilities, but to leave no means unused that might bring about an
