The True Germany

I

MUCH of the criticism of Germany in English and American war literature of the past few months is written in such a vein as to leave the impression that the Germany of to-day is not the real Germany, that it is a perversion of its former self, and that the delivery of the German people from this perverted state and the restoration of the German mind to its earlier and truer type is a demand of humanity, and the real issue of the present war. I have no doubt that most of the persons who hold this view hold it in all seriousness and candor. It therefore seems to me eminently worth while to discuss it with equal seriousness and candor, to examine the foundations on which it rests, to sift what is true and authentic in it from what is specious and sophisticated, and thus to find out what the real relation is between contemporary Germany and the Germany of a hundred years ago; to determine, in brief, to what extent the contemporary German type has preserved and embodies what by the opponents of Imperial Germany is called the true German type.

I am free to confess that I personally feel more at home in the idyllic atmosphere of the Weimar and Jena of the end of the eighteenth century than in the martial industrialism of the Berlin or Hamburg of the beginning of the twentieth. The classic age of Weimar and Jena was one of those rare epochs in the world’s history when spiritual achievements outbalanced the manifestations of material power. Indeed, I doubt whether there ever was a time in which inner strivings so clearly overshadowed external conditions as in the decades that produced Goethe’s Iphigenie and Faust, or Schiller’s Wallenstein and Tell. Germany was then a country of small towns and villages, a land of prevailingly agricultural pursuits. It had no centralized national government, no national parliament, no national army, no national politics of any sort. On the other hand, there was in the Germany of that time a great deal of provincial and local independence, a great variety of intellectual centres, a great deal of patriarchal dignity and simple refinement in the ordinary conduct of life. The great concern of life was the building up of a well-rounded personality, the rational cultivation of individual talent and character. And the ideal of personality was contained in the threefold message of Kant, Goethe, and Schiller: the exaltation of duty as the only true revelation of the divine, the exaltat ion of restless striving for completeness of existence as the way in which erring man works out his own salvation, and the exaltation of æsthetic culture as a means of reconciling the eternal conflict between the senses and the spirit and of leading man to harmony and oneness with himself.

Noble and inspiring as was this ideal of personality est ablished by the classic epoch of German literature and philosophy, it lacked one essential element of effectiveness: it was nearly devoid of the impulse of national self-assertion. This impulse was added to German life by the dire need of the Napoleonic wars, by the stern necessity of summoning the whole strength of the whole people against the ruin threatened by foreign oppression. It was Napoleonic tyranny which created the German nation.

It would, however, be a great mistake to believe that this new conception of German nationality, which was born out of the political wreck of the old German Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century, discarded the high ideal of personality proclaimed by the classic writers of the eighteenth century. On the contrary, the noble triad of ideal incentives of personal conduct bequeathed by them — submission to duty, incessant striving for ever higher activity, and belief in the moral mission of æsthetic culture— was made by their successors the very cornerstone of the new national training upon which the German state of the nineteenth century was to be reared. It might indeed be said that the share taken by these ideals in shaping German public consciousness and in creating German national institutions forms the most important part of German history in the nineteenth century, and has imparted to it many of its most distinctive and characteristic traits. To trace the effect of these ideals upon some at least of the most striking phases of German national life throughout the past hundred years, is tantamount to proving the presence, in Imperial Germany of to-day, of the same spiritual forces which were the glory of cosmopolitan Germany in the time of Kant, Goethe, and Schiller.

II

It is a trite saying that the Prussian state is a living embodiment and a concrete application, upon a large scale, of Kantian principles of duty. Trite as this saying is, it may not be superfluous to analyze its meaning somewhat more closely. There can be no doubt that it is historically correct in so far as the founders of modern Prussia were, directly or indirectly, disciples of the Kantian philosophy. Not that Kant’s views on politics and public affairs did in any specific manner shape Prussian legislation of the early nineteenth century; his views were too individualistic and too little concerned with national needs for that. Not Kant but the men who followed him — Stein, Hardenberg, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Fichte, and Hegel — have been official exponents, so to speak, of the mission of Prussia for a regenerated Germany. But it is nevertheless true that the spirit of the whole work of legislative reform which brought about the reconstruction of Prussia after the battle of Jena would not have been what it was but for the influence of Kant’s thought. ‘ Thou canst, for thou shalt’ — these words in which Kant epi grammatically summed up his view of life were indeed the fundamental creed of all those noble men who, in the years following the Prussian débâcle, tried, as Frederick William III said, to help the state ‘to replace by spiritual agencies what it had lost in physical resources.’

The one thought pervading the Stein-Hardenberg legislation from 1807 to 1810 was to release from inertia and set in motion moral power. By the abolition of serfdom, the mass of the agricultural population was to be converted from a herd of dumb and lifeless subjects into active and spirited workers. By the establishment of municipal self-government throughout Prussia, the cities were to be made a training ground for intelligent and effective participation of the middle classes in public affairs. By the introduction of universal military service, the obligation of every individual of whatever rank or station to prepare to defend with his own life the common cause, was to be made an integral part of the daily existence of the whole people. Stein himself frankly and plainly characterizes the intention of all these legislative measures when in his Reminiscences he says, ‘We started from the fundamental idea of rousing a moral, religious, patriotic spirit in the nation; of inspiring it anew with courage, self-confidence, readiness for every sacrifice in the cause of independence and of national honor; and of seizing the first favorable opportunity to begin the bloody and hazardous struggle for both.’ Little as Kant was given to the expression of patriotic emotions, he would surely have recognized the kinship of such utterances as these, and their practical applications, with his own fundamental conviction that man’s dignity and freedom consist in the unconditional surrender to duty, and that the aim of society is, not the largest possible gratification of the individual instinct for happiness, but the highest possible expression, in individual activity, of mankind’s striving for perfection.

If the political and military reconstruction of Prussia through Stein and Hardenberg may be called an outgrowth of the Kantian conception of moral discipline, the reorganization of higher Prussian education, connected with the names of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Fichte, is clearly based on similar views. In temper and in intellectual sympathies these men were diametrically opposed to each other: Fichte a radical fire-eater, Humboldt a conservative statesman; Fichte a fanatic spokesman of the Germanic craving for the infinite, Humboldt a placid devotee of Greek beauty of form; Fichte a democratic prophet of Socialism, Humboldt an aristocratic upholder of individual culture. But they were at one in the Kantian belief that the aim of education is the training of the will; they were at one in the conviction that it was the educational mission of the Prussian state to create a new type of national character. The most striking result of the efforts of these men was the foundation of the University of Berlin in the very midst of national humiliation and distress, one of the most shining manifestations of faith in the superiority of ideal aspirations over the tyranny of facts that the world has ever seen. But the founding of the University of Berlin was only the most striking result of Humboldt’s and Fichte’s efforts; perhaps even further-reaching, though less conspicuous, was the reorganization of the whole system of public-school instruction throughout Prussia that proceeded from them and their associates. For it was in the first decades of the nineteenth century that Prussia, by combining the democratic ideal of making higher education financially accessible to all classes of society with the aristocratic ideal of stimulating, by careful selection of individuals, the race for intellectual leadership, came to be the foremost organized educational power in Europe. And in the Prussian Gymnasia of the early nineteenth century the categorical imperative of Kant’s moral law assumed a particularly energetic and life-inspiring form; for here the intellectually finest of the Prussian youth of all classes, the son of the butcher or the seamstress no less than the son of the prince and the prime minister, met on the common ground of training for the university; here they were imbued, as the youth of no other nation were, with the duty of surrendering themselves to higher motives and of making themselves fit instruments of the spirit. ‘Work or perish’ was the motto chosen for his own guidance by one of the successors of Humboldt in the administration of the Prussian Gymnasia; it might be called the motto of the whole Prussian educational policy.

In Hegel’s conception of the state this line of moral regeneration that took its start from the Kantian view of duty reached its climax. To Hegel the state is ‘the realization of the ethical idea; it is the ethical spirit as incarnate, self-conscious, substantial will.’ The state is to him an organism uniting in itself all spiritual and moral aspirations of the people, stimulating every kind of public and private activity, straining every nerve and protecting every resource, subordinating all individual comfort to the one great aim of national achievements. It is the source of inspiration for every progress in organization, invention, industrial enterprise, scientific inquiry, philosophical speculation, artistic creation. It is ‘the manifestation of the divine on earth.’

These were the ideas under whose influence generation after generation of the Prussian people, from the beginning of the nineteenth century on, grew up and did their work. These were the ideas which overthrew Napoleon; the ideas which in the thirties and forties, in spite of its overbearing bureaucracy and its reactionary statesmen, made Prussia the only German state from which the political unification of Germany could be looked for; the ideas which in the sixties, under the leadership of such extraordinary men as William I, Bismarck, Moltke, and Lassalle, brought about, on the one hand, the foundation of the new German Empire, on the other hand the organization of the most compact and the most enlightened labor party of modern history.

We have fallen into the habit of summing up this whole set of ideas under the word efficiency. And efficiency it certainly is which all of Germany has been taught by the Prussian conception of the state. But in applying this word to the Germany of to-day we should not forget that it is efficiency inspired by high ideals, by the Kantian precept of the unconditional submission to duty. Can there be any doubt that the spirit shown by the whole German people in the present war is a wonderful exhibition of strength put into the service of moral commands? I certainly do not wish to belittle the spirit of self-sacrifice manifested by other nations in this war. Who above all could fail to have the deepest sympathy with the Belgian people in their heroic defense of their homes and hearths? But none of the nations now fighting, I believe, is filled with the same joyous, jubilant exultancy of self-surrender, the same unswerving and undoubting obedience to the inner voice, the same unshakable conviction of fighting for the best that is in them, that the Germans have shown.

Germany in this conflict has had no need of calling for volunteers: two million of them, from boys of eighteen to graybeards of sixty-five, offered themselves spontaneously without a call at the very proclamation of war. Germany has had no need of a spasmodic resort to prohibition legislation; her soldiers and her workmen are disciplined enough to keep in fit condition for the manufacture and the use of arms. Germany has had no need of scouring Asia and Africa for savage hirelings to wage her war: her own sons, thousands of business and professional men, flocked from all over China to the colors in besieged Kiao-chao, with the absolute certainty of either death or capture, impelled by no other motive than to make good the truly Kantian cablegram sent by the commandant of the fortress to the Emperor: ‘Guarantee fulfillment of duty to the utmost.’ In military achievements, can any of the nations that are besetting Germany match her by such examples of trained intelligence, consummate skill, iron determination, persistent daring, unquestioning devotion, — in short such examples of personalities steeled by obedience to the categorical imperative, — as Germany has given in the captain and the crew of the Emden; in the career of the Dresden and the Eitel Friedrich ; in the submarines that made their way from the North Sea, through the Straits of Gibraltar, into the Dardanelles; or in that living wall of millions of men that are steadily and relentlessly flinging back the assault upon her own frontiers by all the great powers of Europe?

I cannot forego quoting from some letters which I have received during the winter from one of these men, — letters which illustrate the spirit ingrained into all Germany by a century of Prussian tradition of characterbuilding. The writer is at the head of one of Germany’s foremost publishing houses. Although a man of over sixty, he volunteered at the outbreak of the war, together with his oldest son, a young musician of unusual promise. The son fell in one of the early engagements near Dixmude; the fat her is captain in a Landsturm regiment holding the trenches around Lille. These are among the things he writes: —

‘A friendly fate has after all taken me and my Landsturm battalion into the enemy’s country, directly behind the long war front which is gradually being pushed westward. I had already begun to fear that I would be kept all the time in guarding prisoners’ camps, which, easy as the service is, would have come to be intolerably tedious in the long run. Happily, my wife has stood the double leave-taking better then I feared. The night before Heinrich’s [the son’s] departure, she sat all night long at his bed, he peacefully sleeping with his hand lying in hers and only from time to time awakening for a moment to feel the comfort of being thus guarded. “As a mother comforteth”— the scripture says. When at five o’clock in the morning he had left her with the words, “You are a wonder of a mother,” and she was sitting alone in the dining-room sobbing, suddenly a little angel in a nightgown [the youngest boy] came downstairs and put his hand in hers, reminding her of what was still left to her.’

‘ “Volunteer R. missing since November 10,” is a wireless message from the 234th regiment that reached me yesterday, after my wife and I for a fortnight had been worried by the absence of all news and later had been startled by postal cards addressed to the boy being returned, with the official mark, “wounded.” When or whether we shall ever hear anything definite about his fate is doubtful. What alarms me most is my poor wife. God give her trust and strength. I myself shall pull through; the constant duties of the day, the intercourse with comrades, and horseback riding will help me. And happily, my wife and I find the same well of comfort in the Word of God, which one lives in these days as never before, without any dogmatic doubts. And how can we ask anything special for ourselves, when each and all make such sacrifices for the Fatherland? These sacrifices will not be in vain.’

‘Since yesterday I know that I shall not see Heinrich again. What this means for us, I need not tell you. I had labored and labored to make my heart firm, but that the blow would be so terrific, so crushing, I had not imagined. My wife thus far has struggled through heroically, in the clear consciousness that she must save herself for our youngest and me, so far as it is in her power. If the same feeling did not uphold me, I would, in spite of my age and my poor hearing, apply to be transferred to the first line. We cannot understand the sufferings which now are heaped upon us and countless others. The only help is to go on with our tasks. Christmas time will give my wife plenty of opportunity to show love to others and thereby to combat the void at her own hearth.’

‘The day before yesterday, since I could not get any definite news, I rode about sixty kilometres northward into Flanders. That I could do it I owe to special circumstances. What would happen, if the roads, crowded with troops as they are, and the precious motor cars were often used thus for the sake of a poor common soldier! After some searching about, I at last found Heinrich’s company, shrunk from 250 to 90, quartered in a little church at West Roosebecke, the tower of which had been demolished in order not to attract the fire of the enemy near by. Soon I was surrounded by a crowd of young men who had taken part in the last battle together with Heinrich. He had been among the skirmishers in front of the storming company, they said. Close before the enemy’s line, he was shot through the left arm, tried to creep back, was shot in the back, fell over, and was left dead on the ground, next to his friend and classmate K. Since the French shoot even at men burying the dead, they could not bury him. A few days before, Heinrich himself had rescued a wounded comrade who had crept into a baking-oven directly in front of the enemy’s position. They said he had been more spirited and exuberant and joyous in the performance of his duties than most of his comrades. What could he have been to them in the long evenings, as they were huddled together in that little church.’

‘ Of war-weariness or discouragement there is not a shadow of a trace among us. Detachments of the recruits of 1914 have just arrived here, to finish their drill in the enemy’s country. They are singing, singing, singing, wherever you meet them, just like the volunteers of last August of whom so many are now sleeping underground. My heart grows tender when I talk with them or look at them while I ride past them. Our opponents have no conception of what stuff our people is made.’

III

By the side of Kant’s stern doctrine of duty there must be placed, as another of the great legacies left to Germany by her classic writers, the Goethean gospel of salvation through ceaseless striving. It is Goethe who has impressed upon German life the Superman motif. As his own life was a combination of Wilhelm Meister and Faust in their undaunted striding from experience to experience and in their everrenewed efforts to round out their own being, so it may be said that there is something Faustlike and something Meisterlike in most of the representative men of German literature in the nineteenth century, above all in Heinrich von Kleist, Hebbel, Otto Ludwig, Richard Wagner, Nietzsche. None of these men were religious formalists; to all of them life was an experiment of deepest import; all of them found the value of life in wrestling with its fundamental problems. And this whole tradition of striving has imparted even to the average German of to-day a mental strenuousness and an emotional intensity such as is absent from the average European of other stock, not to mention the average American. A strange spectacle indeed, and an inspiring one: a people naturally slow and of phlegmatic temper stirred to its depths by intellectual and spiritual forces and thereby keyed up to an eagerness and swiftness of action which gives it easily the first place in the race for national self-improvement. What other people equals the German in the readiness to react upon stimuli from abroad, to adopt and incorporate ideas grown on foreign soil? Where have Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Calderón, Ibsen exerted as truly popular and deeply penetrating an influence as in Germany? Where have they become educational forces of equal momentum? Is there any other country where the knowledge of foreign languages is so widely spread? any other country where there is so much individual desire for solid learning? any other country where individual talent is as carefully and conscientiously cultivated? any other country where there is so much honest and serious effort to approach the great questions of existence from an individual angle, to restate them in personal terms, to find new answers and new vistas?

American students who have lived in German families of the middle classes, for instance the family of a Gymnasiallehrer or a government official, will bear testimony to the fact that German daily life of to-day in all these respects upholds the Goethean tradition of a hundred years ago. Indeed, the reign of the present Emperor has given particularly conspicuous evidence of this spirit of striving and effort penetrating all departments of life. For what sphere of activity is there in which the Emperor’s example, his universal and impassioned impulse for achievement, has not borne fruit? Only one of these fruits, matured in the midst of the present war, may be singled out. In October, 1914, there was formally opened, with simple ceremonies, the new University of Frankfort, the first German university to be founded by an individual city. Well may the professors and students of this latest German university be proud of the date of its birth. For it will proclaim to posterity that not even the most fearful crisis that ever befell a people has been able to crush the German striving for ideal achievements, the Faustlike determination to make every new experience a stepping-stone for a higher one, and thus to press on to completeness of existence.

Together with Kant and Goethe, Schiller stands as guardian of the best that the German people has contributed to human progress in the nineteenth century. To him more than to any other individual is it due t hat the German people believes as no other people believes in the moral mission of æsthetic culture. Schiller’s whole activity was rooted in the conviction that beauty is the great reconciler, that not only in the creation of the beautiful but also in its enjoyment man overcomes the conflict between his sensuous and his spiritual nature, becomes at one with himself, rises to his full stature. This conviction, consciously embraced by the educated, instinctively absorbed by the masses, has come to be one of the great popular forces that have moulded German national character in the nineteenth century and distinguished it from the emotional life of most other peoples.

To the German, the drama is a sacred matter. He looks to it for inspiration, widening of sympathies, upheaval of emotions, cleansing of purpose, strengthening of the will. From Schiller on to Hauptmann and Schönherr, generation after generation of German dramatic writers has tried to live up to this ideal, not always with full artistic success, always with nobility of aim. Any one who has attended the annual performances at Weimar, arranged by the Schillerbund for the flower of German youth from all over the empire, will know something of the effect which this view of the drama has exercised upon the German people. Even now, in the midst of the war, when in London the serious stage has given way to the noisy and sensational vaudeville show, the German theatres in all cities, large and small, maintain and emphasize the classic tradition and add their share to the ennobling of national character.

To the German, music is a sacred matter. Who could describe what Beethoven and Schubert and Schumann and Wagner have been to the German people throughout these past hundred years? Who could measure the wealth of comfort, delight, strength, elevation, which song — song giving wings to the feelings of an Uhland, Eichendorff, Heine, Lenau, Geibel — has showered upon countless German homes? And Beethoven, as well as folk-song, has accompanied the German nation into the war. Not a catchy and meaningless music-hall tune is what the German soldiers love to sing in the trenches, but ‘Es braust ein Ruf wie Donnerhall,’ or ‘ In der Heimat, in der Heimat — da giebt’s ein Wiedersehn!’

To the German, the enjoyment of nature is a sacred matter. A short time before his death, in his eightieth year, Ludwig Tieck declared that the greatest event in his whole life, the event which had influenced and shaped his character more than any other, had been a sunrise which he had watched as a youth of eighteen when he was tramping in the Thuringian mountains. That is German sentiment. That is what millions of Germans feel to-day. That is what makes the flowerpots bloom behind the windowpanes— kept so scrupulously clean — of German tenement houses; what has transformed the public squares of German cities into parks and meadows; what makes Whitsuntide, with its joyful roaming through field and forest, with its bedecking of all houses with the young foliage, the most charming of all German holidays. That is what made the ‘field-gray’ of the German troops marching into war last August disappear under such masses of roses as if all the German gardens had emptied themselves upon them.

No, the Germany of to-day is not a perversion of a former and better type. It is a normal and splendid outgrowth of national ideals that have been at work for more than a century, — the ideals of training the will, of stimulating energy, and of cultivating the soul. To give once more concrete illustrations of the type of personality developed under the influence of these ideals, I quote again from some letters that I received at the beginning of this year. This is from a widow living near Lake Constance, whose eldest son, a young Uhlan who volunteered fresh from the Gymnasium, had come home on furlough for the Christmas holidays.

‘On the twenty-fourth I rode to Constance to fetch our Christmas surprise, our dear tall Uhlan who was allowed to spend three whole days with us. It was a wonderful time for us. The children dragged him about everywhere, from the cellar to the attic, from the garden into the field. It was a joy to see him playing for them gay riders’ songs on the piano, whist ling tunes to the guitar, etc. But he has grown very serious. A veil lies over his youthful face; and there is something touchingly protecting in the way in which he behaves toward the children. His features in repose are strangely sad; and strangely mature he seemed when he talked, so reservedly and yet so understandingly, with a neighbor who had just heard of the death of his only son. There were three steamers full of reservists when on the third day I accompanied him across the lake. Some fifty people were at the pier and waved good-bye. A young lad next to us on the steamer, who had kept up waving back a long time, broke into despairing sobs when his aged mother vanished out of sight. But they all spoke firmly and with wonderful elevation about our beloved fatherland. It helped me to keep myself in hand. And now — as God wills.’

The next is from a young minister who studied at the Harvard Divinity School last year and who on the day of his return to Germany volunteered as a private. His three brothers were also in the field; two of them have since been killed. He was struck by a shell while carrying a wounded officer out of the firing line. The following words are from a letter written in the hospital on the day of his death.

‘Depression of spirit I battle down with good weapons and good success. Anxious thought about my brothers makes me almost glad not to have any news from home. How long will it last? One must reach out for the great things.’

And this is from a young artillery officer, by profession a chemical expert in one of the great German industrial laboratories, who writes from the trenches at Ypres.

‘After a magnificent sunset, we were called to the Christmas service. It was held in a barn; the walls covered with fir branches; torches and candles the only form of lighting; a curious mixture of the real stall of Bethlehem and our traditional Christmas. The chaplain spoke simply and nicely: Christmas should bring inner peace to us, even in the field, and make our whole army feel as one great, family.

‘Then our captain made an inspiring and patriotic address, with cheers for the Emperor, winding up with the distribution of some iron crosses, one of them falling to my lot. And finally the opening of the packages from home. What an infinite love these numberless presents revealed; how they made us feel that the soul of Germany is with us in the fight! During the night— it was a still, clear, frosty night — we sent our improvised band into the trench nearest the French and had it play to them Christmas songs and marches. One really must guard one’s self against sentimentality in these times. But this, I think, is true —that the war has created a mutual respect between the fighting peoples; and upon the basis of this mutual respect there may perhaps arise a more solid coöperation of nations than the friends of eternal peace have thus far been able to bring about.’

IV

How is it possible that a people animated by such a spirit, a people which for a century has assiduously and devotedly labored to produce types of human personality as noble and enlightened as any people ever has brought forth — how is it possible that such a people should suddenly appear to large numbers of intelligent observers as an enemy of mankind, as a menace to t he security and peace of the rest of the world? Much of the hostile criticism of Imperial Germany, of its alleged sinister craving for world-dominion, or its atrocious conduct of the war, is outright slander and willful distortion. It is indeed a grim mockery to have the tentative and circumscribed efforts made by Germany during the past twenty-five years for colonial expansion denounced by the enemies of Germany as dangerous and intolerable aggression, when one remembers that during these same years England throttled the independence of the South African republics, established a protectorate over Egypt, partitioned Persia — together with Russia — into ‘spheres of influence,’ encouraged France to build up an immense colonial empire in Cochin China, Madagascar, Tunis, and Morocco, allowed Italy to conquer Tripoli, and helped Japan to tighten her grip upon China. As to the manner of the German conduct of war, here also a huge mass of extraordinary exaggerations and a vast amount of anonymous aspersions have been indulged in. For the rest, these accusations find their explanation in the fact that Germany thus far has in the main been able to ward off the enemy from her own soil and to transfer the deadly work of destruction into the enemy’s country.

And yet, there is a residuum of truth in the assertion that Germany during the last generation has overreached herself. So far as this is the case, she bears her part of the guilt of having conjured up the present world calamity. In saying this, I am not thinking of Germany’s consistent policy of formidable armament. For I fail to see how Germany could have afforded not to prepare for war, so long as she found herself surrounded by neighbors every one of them anxious to curb her rising power. What I am thinking of is a spirit of superciliousness which, as a very natural concomitant of a century of extraordinary achievement, has developed, especially during the last twenty-five years, in the ruling classes of Germany.

The manifestations of this spirit have been many and varied. In German domestic conditions, it has led to the growth of a capitalistic class as snobbish and overbearing as it is resourceful and intelligent, counteracting by its uncompromising Herrenmoral the good effect of the wise and provident social legislation inaugurated by Bismarck. It has led to excesses of military rule and to assertions of autocratic power which have embittered German party politics and have driven large numbers of Liberal voters into the Socialist ranks, as the only party consistently and unswervingly upholding Parliamentary rights. In Germany’s foreign relations, it has led to a policy which was meant to be firm but had an appearance of arrogance and aggressiveness and easily aroused suspicion. Suspicion of Germany led to her isolation. And her isolation has finally brought on the war.

It should, however, be said that these excesses of German vitality, so skillfully used by anti-German writers to discredit Germany’s position in the present conflict, have not, as is assert ed, been a serious danger to the rest of the world. Rather have they been an element of weakness to Germany herself. They are not essentially different from the spirit of haughty masterfulness that characterized English foreign policies and English insular self-sufficiency throughout the larger part of the nineteenth century; or from the French belief in the superiority of France in all matters of higher civilization; or even from the American assumption that the United States is the foremost standard-bearer of international justice and righteousness. They are an impressive instance of that tragic national selfoverestimation which seems to be inseparable from periods of striking national ascendancy, both quickening and endangering this ascendancy itself.

Let us hope that this tragic situation — the catastrophe of greatness, induced, partly at least, through the faults of its virtues — will have a solution worthy of the noble ideals that sustained Germany’s upward flight. Let us hope that it will lead to the purging, purifying, and strengthening of German greatness through this fearful trial. A letter received recently from a German judge, now fighting as lieutenant on the Russian frontier, points to such a hope. He writes: ‘The conduct of our men in this war is beyond all praise. Whatever may be the outcome of the war, the German people is bound to gain by it in inner strength. All classes have come to know what they are to each other, and we confidently trust that they will never forget it. The party strife thus far waged with venom and hatred will give way to a generous and objective discussion of honestly conflicting opinions, and the ideal of constructive social work will be more fully grasped and more devotedly pursued than ever before. To us in the field, that will be the best reward.’

Whether these hopes of the future are ever fulfilled in their totality or not, our survey of the past and the present of Germany has, I trust, made it clear that the German people of today is not, as its enemies declare, a degenerate perversion of a former and nobler type. On the contrary, with all its defects and excrescences of temper, it is a splendid outgrowth of a century’s training in the national application of those ideals which distinguished the classic period of German literature and philosophy: unconditional submission to duty, unremitting endeavor for intellectual advance, assiduous cultivation of the things that give joy to the soul. A people that believes in these ideals cannot be lost.