where the feudal system began. After the Roman Empire went to pieces in the eclipse of the Dark Ages, when history once again begins to give us faint light, we find a new organization of society, new manners and customs. There is, properly speaking, no state and no nationality. There is a hierarchy of powers and of social and political privileges.

Those who believe, and they are the majority, that it was Germanic in origin, are probably right, and nowhere did this system of dependence take a stronger hold, though there is no record that the Germans excelled in the peculiarly knightly or chivalric virtues. Froissart, the chronicler of late chivalry, is not complimentary. "The Germans are covetous and do nothing, unless money first passes, for they are a very covetous people." Giesebrecht, the German historian, likewise regrets the "Insatiable cupidity" of the robber barons of the Middle Age. One virtue, however, they had, which became proverbial. Over and over we find in their older literature stories of Deutsche Treue, fidelity to their overlords, this voluntary and not servile fidelity of which we have spoken. If it is a

virtue it is not a freeman's virtue, and it would seem to linger in the Teutonic temper still, for as a recent writer has remarked, very frequently when Germans came to this country and settled in the West or Middle West they tended to group themselves around a leader to whom they intrusted their affairs and who doubtless on many occasions was allowed to guide and direct them.

With this mediæval temper not yet abolished, it is not unnatural that the feudal and autocratic system should have maintained its hold and should have been adopted in militaristic Prussia. Nowhere are the landed barons, Junkers, so great a power in the state. Their respect for authority and their willingness to have it obtrude itself into all the details of their life is comic to free peoples. The narrow path to the Prussian heaven is lined with Verboten signs. Prussian discipline is subservience tempered by enthusiasm. That is the secret of Prussia's military organization. That is why the young Prussian recruit at the command of his enraged officer can and does drink down the filthy contents of a barrack-room cuspidor, and while

raising it to his lips can raise himself to such heights of self-mastery that he will not allow his superior to guess that the order is displeasing. This is militarism, this is discipline, but it is not democracy. Yet it is but one of the abuses of militarism in time of peace which the defense had cited in the Rosa Luxemburg trial, and to which it had found witnesses brave enough to testify.*

It is therefore plain that the spirit of Prussia is not the spirit of America. It is autocratic, militaristic, feudal. It is not for us, it is against us.

* At the request of the government this interesting trial was adjourned against the protests of the defense, early in July, 1914. Some of the most revolting cases are given below.

"In the Queen Augusta Guard Regiment No. 4, Sergeant Waske ordered a grenadier to lie down before a cuspidor, and then called out 'Drink.' The grenadier drank from it quite obediently, which proves that 'servile obedience' (Kadavergehorsam) is no idle phrase.'

"In the Guard Train Battalion, Non-Commissioned Officer Hoffman ordered exercises which consisted in bending the knees, while the men had to hold a full manure-box in their outstretched arms."

"In the 50th Infantry, Non-Commissioned Officer Poeselt, at inspection of the rooms, ordered the recruits to take cuspidors into their hands, and he then threw the disgusting contents into their faces."

"In the King's Grenadier Regiment No. 7 a recruit was also ordered to drink the contents of a cuspidor."

"In the Württemberg Uhlan Regiment No. 19, Non-Commissioned Officer Krall struck a tubercular Uhlan with his carbine across the helmet so that it broke to pieces, and the Uhlan got a hemorrhage from the mouth and nose. During the extra drill this poor soldier was made to run, and had to lie down in a pool of rain-water. He died before the

The threat which it holds out against any alien government is further reinforced by its conception of the state. This conception is scarcely more than a century old, yet it is absolutely incompatible with any idea of international law or of any brotherhood of nations, and is a development of the originally innocent philosophizing of Fichte and Hegel. The older Prussians had no state in the modern sense, they had only masters. When the sense of nationality began to develop the philosophers created a conception which naturally was fraught with no danger to Prussia's rulers.

We Americans believe that we are the state,

main trial of the N. C. O. came off; the latter escaped with two months' imprisonment."

"In the Prussian Infantry Regiment No. 11, Corporal Schlolaut made a recruit throw himself on the floor and jump up again (auf- und niederwerfen) twenty times in one evening. When this got too difficult for the man, the corporal pressed him down with his knees. Shortly thereafter the tormentor of this recruit pushed him against a clothes closet about twenty-one times, threw a coffee-pot at him, and pulled him across the wash-stand by the throat. When this recruit later on was pushed against the clothes closet he ran away and committed suicide soon thereafter. Corporal Schlolaut escaped with two months' imprisonment."

"In the Prussian Infantry Regiment No. 70 a recruit was maltreated by the 'professional regulars' (alte Leute) during the night in such a fashion that, in desperation, he jumped out of a second-story window, and was found in the courtyard unconscious and seriously injured."

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.. Beating and abuse have been in vogue in the Prussian Army as long as it has existed, nearly 275 years; every effort to eradicate the trouble has so far failed." Cf. "German Militarism." (Committee on Public Information.)

that it is "you and me.' It has no existence outside of the citizens who compose it and from whom it receives its power and its life. If it is immoral, we who are it are immoral; it is responsible as we are responsible. As its actions are our actions, we therefore wish them to be worthy to conform to a standard as high, indeed, higher, if possible, than our own.

Not so with the Prussian state as developed from Hegel's conception through Treitschke, Nietzsche, and Bernhardi. Their state is not "you and me." It is not the spirit and expression of the sum total of all the citizens. It is something far greater, higher, and more powerful than they. Although, according to Hegel, the individual can demand that the other individual in the state respect him, he cannot expect the state to respect him. He must respect it. It does not exist by virtue of him. He exists by virtue of it. It is his "substance." He cannot pretend to rule it. It rules him. The idea of the state, says Hegel, "should be venerated as a real God upon earth." Furthermore, it is dynamic, with a will of its own. Ordinary standards of morality cannot be applied to it.