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So that I thought: Suppose a soul, arrived on earth from another world, wholly ignorant of earth, without any mortal ties whatever, were given its choice after a survey of the nations, which it should be born in and belong to? In May, June and July, 1914, my choice would have been, not France, not England, not America, but Germany.

It was on the seventh day of June, 1914, that Frankfurt assembled her school children in the opera house, to further their taste and understanding of Germany’s supreme national art. Exactly eleven months later, on May 7, 1915, a German torpedo sank the Lusitania; and the cities of the Rhine celebrated this also for their school children.

VI

The world is in agony. We witness the most terrible catastrophe known to mankind–most terrible, not from its huge size, but because it is a moral catastrophe. Through centuries of suffering and cruelty, guided by religion, we thought we had attained to knowledge of and belief in a public right between nations, and an honorable warfare, if warfare must be. This has been shattered to pieces. No need to investigate further the atrocities at Liege or Louvain. These and more have indeed been amply proved, but what need of proof after the Lusitania school festival? In that holiday we see the feast of Kultur, the Teutonic climax. How came it to pass? Is it the same Germany who gave those two holidays to her school children? The opera in Frankfurt, and this orgy of barbaric blood-lust, guttural with the deep basses of the fathers and shrill with the trebles of their young? Their young, to whom they teach one day the gentle melodies of Lortzing, and to exult in world-assassination on another?

Goethe said–and the words glow with new prophetic light: “Germans are of yesterday; … a few centuries must still elapse before … it will be said of them, ‘It is long since they were barbarians.'” And again: “National hatred is a peculiar thing. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of Kultur.” But how came it to pass? Do the two holidays proceed from the same Kultur, the same Fatherland?

They do; and nothing in the whole story of mankind is more strange than the case of Germany–how Germany through generations has been carefully trained for this wild spring at the throat of Europe that she has made. The Servian assassination has nothing to do with it, save that it accidentally struck the hour. Months and years before that, Germany was crouching for her spring. In one respect the war she has incubated is the old assault of Xerxes, of Alexander, of Napoleon, of every one who has been visited by the dangerous dream of world conquest. Only, never before has the dream been taught to a people on such a scale, not merely because of the vast modern apparatus, but much more because no subjects of any despot have ever been so politically docile and credulous as the Germans.

In another respect this war resembles strikingly our own and the French Revolution. All three were prepared and fomented by books, by teachings from books. The American brain seized hold of certain doctrines and generalizations of Locke, Montesquieu, Burlamaqui and Beccaria concerning the rights of man and the consent of the governed. The French brain nourished and inspired itself with some theorems of the encyclopedists and of Rousseau about man’s natural innocence and the social contract. The Teutonic brain assimilated some diplomatic and philosophic precepts laid down by Machiavelli, Nietzsche and Treitschke. Indeed, Fichte, during the Winter of 1807-08, at the University of Berlin, made an address to the German people which may be accounted the first famous academic harbinger and source of the present Teutonic state of mind. Here the parallel stops. With America and France, war made way for independence, liberty and freedom, political and moral; Germany would establish everywhere her absolute military despotism. We shall reach in due course the full statement of her creed; we are not ready for it yet.