been embodied in Frederick the Great and in Bismarck -men whose genius would have had no play unless the millions of Germans whom they mastered had been living on a moral level where such methods were accepted as ideal.

Over against Frederick and Bismarck let us set two incarnations of American ideals, George Washington, the contemporary of Frederick, and Abraham Lincoln, the contemporary of Bismarck. They, too, wrought to create a nation and to preserve and unify it - but their work was modern; their principle was Liberty; their methods were moral and humane: whereas Frederick might have been the twin of Gaiseric, the Vandal, and Bismarck, the brother of Brennus, the Gaul. "Vae victis!" "Woe to the conquered!" Brennus shouted as he threw his sword into the scales on which, in B.C. 389, the Romans were heaping their ransom. "Vae victis!" was Bismarck's motto, when he extorted his indemnity from strangled France in A.D. 1871.

Twenty-three centuries separated Brennus from Bismarck, but the Prussian ideal had not advanced beyond that of the Barbarian Gaul.

Bismarck saw, however, that something more than a large army, magnificently drilled, would be needed to maintain Prussian ascendancy in the German Empire. Although he regarded readiness for war as undebatable, he was too adept a statesman not to resent a little the assumption of the militarists that the State must be organized to serve the will of the Army, and that the Army must be called in to settle every international dispute. Bismarck knew that in his hands Diplomacy, without shedding a drop of blood, had won campaigns hardly less important to Prussia than those of Sadowa or Sedan. Why resort to a surgical operation at every moment, when the pharmacopoeia of Diplomacy - bread pills, perhaps even hypnotism or a little poison — would serve?

The Teutonic lust for war having been de

veloped to an unprecedented degree, Bismarck now set about evoking the spirit of vassalage

that other immemorial Teutonic heirloom. Responding to modern conditions, this took the form of a capacity for obedience and a submissiveness to discipline unexampled among any civilized race into whose ears the word Liberty had ever been whispered.

CHAPTER IV

MANIPULATING TEUTONIC TRAITS

Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? There is more hope of a fool than of him. Proverbs, XXVI, 12.

A

UNIVERSAL military service not only standardized German experience, by subjecting all German men during their impressionable years to the same sort of life and to a uniform drill, but it also deepened in them that atavistic craving for discipline, and that capacity for obedience, which made them both obsequious towards those above them and insolent towards those below. They lacked initiative: but they were patient, thorough, easily satisfied if they had sufficient sausage and beer for their stomachs and music for their ears. These Teutonic masses, which resemble in so many points the Chinese rather than any European race, were slowly organized into a machine as vast as Germany itself.

In industry, agriculture, and commerce dis

cipline similar to that in the Army was established. Education came under the iron rule. The State subsidized the opera houses and theatres. There was no art, but there were many painters and sculptors who looked to official patrons for recognition. When the site of Berlin is again a wilderness for four-footed wolves and wild boars, the elephantine monstrosities which William II set up in the Siegesallee, to glorify his Hohenzollern forerunners, may remain to enlighten posterity as to the artistic sense of the Prussians when they decided to go forth and subjugate the world. The State Church had long been fossilized: in the Roman Church the Jesuits flourished.

Little by little the university professors, some through blandishments, some through rebukes and snubs, some by their own undisguised preference, became a wheel of the State machine. The professorial class, bred for the most part from the bourgeoisie, inherited the inborn German reverence for the titled classes, and its members were easily flattered by the