Chamberlain declared to Wilhelm that Germany now had to become the world's greatest power, both for its own good and for the good of the rest of the world. In his letter, Chamberlain dismissed France as a second-rate nation that could only fall further; Russia was a nation of "stupid" Slavs which was only just being held together because Nicholas II had German blood; without the German blood in the House of Romanov "nothing would remain but a decaying "matière brute"" in Russia; and Britain was clearly declining into a bottomless pit of greed, ineffective democratic politics and unrestrained individualism. Chamberlain was very anti-American and called the United States a "Dollar dynasty", writing: