Bemoaning the loss of "Merry Old England", this view argued for a return to a highly romanticized portrait of a mythic, bucolic period of English history, with the people living happily in harmony with nature on the land overseen by a benevolent, cultured elite.

Against the conclusions of Eduard Strasburger, Julius von Sachs, and other leading botanists, he argued that his observations could not be explained by the application of the fluid mechanical theories of the day to the motion of water in the plants' xylem conduits.

During this time it is said his ideas on race began taking shape, influenced by the concept of Teutonic supremacy he believed embodied in the works of Richard Wagner and the French racist writer Arthur de Gobineau.

[65]Chamberlain's awe and pride in the tremendous scientific and technological advances of the 19th century were always tempered with an extremely strong nostalgia for what he saw as the simpler, better and more innocent time when people lived on the land in harmony with nature.

[77] In July 1900, Chamberlain wrote to his aunt: One thing I can clearly see, that is, that it is criminal for Englishmen and Dutchmen to go on murdering each other for all sorts of sophisticated reasons, while the Great Yellow Danger overshadows us white men and threatens destruction ...

The fact that a tiny nation of peasants absolutely untrained in the conduct of war, has been able to keep the whole united empire at bay for months, and has only been overcome—and has it been overcome?—by sending out an army superior in number to the whole population including women and children, has lowered respect for England beyond anything you can imagine on your side of the water, and will certainly not remain lost on the minds of those countless millions who have hitherto been subdued by our prestige only.

Irresponsible Jewish capitalism was sharply distinguished from the vague ideal of Teutonic industrialism, a romantic vision of an advanced technological society which had somehow managed to retain the Volksgemeinschaft, cooperation and hierarchy of the medieval guilds.

"[123] Chamberlain declared in his letter that all British businessmen were now dishonest; the middle class, smug and stupid; small farmers and shops were no longer able to compete with Jewish-owned big business; and the monarchy was "irretrievably weakened" by social change.

[129] Until Chamberlain's death, he and Wilhelm had what the American historian Geoffrey Field called "a warm, personal bond", which was expressed in a series of "... elaborate, wordy letters, full of mutual admiration and half-baked ideas".

[69] The liberal Berliner Zeitung newspaper complained in an editorial of the close friendship between Wilhelm II and such an outspoken racist and anti-Semite as Chamberlain, stating this was a real cause for concern for decent, caring people both inside and outside Germany.

[135] Buruma observed that for all his much-vaunted beliefs in public about the superiority of everything German, in private Wilhelm often displayed signs of an inferiority complex to the British, as if he really felt deep down that it was Britain, not Germany, that was the world's greatest country.

[136] Writing about the Chamberlain-Wilhelm relationship, Field stated: Chamberlain helped place Wilhelm's tangled and vaguely formulated fears of Pan Slavism, the black and yellow "hordes", Jews, Ultramontanes, Social Democrats, and free-thinkers to a global and historical framework copiously footnoted and sustained by a vast array of erudite information.

[139] Chamberlain received invitations to lecture on his racial theories at Yale and Johns Hopkins universities, but turned them down on the grounds that he had no wish to visit what he viewed as a culturally and spiritually debased nation like the United States.

[47] The few who knew Chamberlain well described him as a quiet, reserved man full of urbane erudition and charm; a modest, genial character with elegant manners dressed in expensive suits who could talk brilliantly and with much wit about a great number of subjects for hours.

His copious notebooks and letters show a man with "a profoundly irrational mind", a markedly sadistic and deeply paranoid individual who believed himself to be the victim of a monstrous worldwide Jewish conspiracy to destroy him.

[148] In a 1906 letter to Wilhelm, Chamberlain announced that due to miscegenation caused by the Jews, Britain, France, Austria and Russia were all declining powers, and only the "pure" German Reich was capable of protecting the "life-giving center of Western Europe" from the "Tartarized Russians, the dreaming weakly mongrels of Oceania and South America, and the millions of blacks, impoverished in intellect and bestially inclined, who even now are arming for the war of the races in which there will be no quarter given".

[176] Quoting the French scientist Gustave Le Bon, Chamberlain wrote the vast majority of people were simply too stupid to properly understand the issues, and as such Germany with its rule by elites was a much better governed nation than France.

[178] Field summarized Chamberlain's thesis "... the essence of German freedom was the willing submission as a matter of conscience to legitimately constituted authorities; it implied duty more than rights and was something spiritual and internal for which each moral being had to strive.

[181] Chamberlain wrote that America "is a hellish whirlpool, in which all the contradictions of the world, all the greed, envy and lust brew and simmer; a wild struggle of millions of ignorant egotists, men without ideas, ideals, or traditions, without shared values, without any capacity for sacrifice, an atomic chaos endowed with no true power of nature".

[182] Until the United States entered the war in 1917, the Auswärtiges Amt worked hard to prevent Chamberlain's essays with their strong anti-American content from appearing abroad out of the fear that they would offend opinion in America.

[182] Chamberlain's wartime writings also gained much attention – albeit of a highly negative sort – in his native Britain, with The Times Literary Supplement declaring: "The most ignorant of the Germans has not written greater nonsense.

[69] Chamberlain explained in Germany and England how the British were once noble Aryans like the Germans who lived in a perfect rigidly hierarchical, romantically rural "unmixed" society, but then starting in the 16th century capitalism had corrupted the English.

[69] Chamberlain wrote with disgust how the sons of the English aristocracy "disappear from society to make money", leading to a warped "moral compass" on their part in contrast to Germany where the Junkers either tended to their estates or had careers in the Army.

[169] Chamberlain wrote the purpose of this "struggle" was "salvation from the claws of the un-German and anti-German", going on to quote from Wagner's 1850 anti-Semitic essay Das Judenthum in der Musik that "Against this devil's brood stands Germany as God's champion: Siegfried against the worm!

[187] In a letter to his friend Prince Maximilian of Baden, Chamberlain wrote: I learned today from a man who is especially well-placed to observe these things—even when they go on secretly—that the Jews are completely intoxicated by their success in Germany—first from the millions they have gained through the war, then because of the praise showered on them in all official quarters, and thirdly from the protection they and their machinations enjoy from the censor.

"[200] Chamberlain was disappointed that Tirpitz had not been appointed Chancellor; however, he was overjoyed with Bethmann Hollweg's resignation and welcomed the increased power of Hindenburg and Ludendorff in political affairs as giving Germany the sort of government it needed.

Wilhelm wrote to Chamberlain on 15 January 1917, stating: The war is a struggle between two Weltanschauungen, the Teutonic-German for morality, right, loyalty and faith, genuine humanity, truth and real freedom, against ... the worship of Mammon, the power of money, pleasure, land-hunger, lies, betrayal, deceit and—last but not least—treacherous assassination!

All the other additional factors—Russian greed, French vanity, Italian bombast, the envious and cowardly spirit of the neutrals—are whipped up, made crazy; the Jew and the Yankee are the driving forces that operate consciously and in a certain sense have hitherto been victorious or at all events successful ...

[225] Despite his paralysis, Chamberlain whose mind was still sharp, remained active as a writer, maintaining a correspondence with a whole gamut of figures from Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz to the radical anti-Semitic journalist Theodor Fritsch, the leader of the völkisch Hammerbund ("Hammer League").

[244] The only Nazi idea that Chamberlain missed was Lebensraum (living space), the perceived need for Germany to colonize Eastern Europe while displacing the existing population to make room for Aryan colonists.