So also is the following statement of what education ought to teach. "The State should teach that the mind which thinks only of itself perishes in feeble susceptibility, but that moral worth grows up only in the love of the Fatherland and for the State, which is the haven of every faith and the home of justice and honourable freedom of purpose." I have italicized the words which show the feebleness of the German intellect in these fields of thought.

The following argument could hardly have been put forth seriously in any country where argument was an instrument of government: Count von Bernstorff insisted that Germany had not utilized the Belgian route because it was the quickest and easiest into France, but had gone through Belgium only because she was forced to act on the defensive. Germany knew that some day France was going to invade Belgium; but France could wait; Germany could not wait. Thus it was really France that began the war.

A man who had spent his youth in the debating club would not have presented such a case as this to the world; but in a tyranny there is no distinction between dogma and argument. The official view is propounded and that is enough.

Bernhardi's books will always be valuable as

the best short explanation of the war. They give the mind of the Teuton in 1914. They have done more towards explaining the disease which is now ravaging the German intellect than all the rest of German literature taken together. Moreover, Bernhardi's books will always have a specific psychopathic interest. The future student will handle them with curiosity, saying: "Sixty-four million people once, and for a short time, believed these things."

The keynote of the German creed is as follows: War is the natural state of man, and "evokes the noblest activities of human nature." "The brutal incidents inseparable from every war vanish completely in the idealism of the main results." These beliefs, it should be noticed, give respectability to the German designs against France. They lend the light of conscience and religion to a crime, and invoke a great principle to cover a piece of private vengeance. The Germans, being a highly bookish and sophisticated people, require good motives for bloodshed. The Holy Ghost is therefore summoned. The sin of feebleness is, it appears, "The political sin against the Holy Ghost."

In order to make it seem probable that the Germans will win in their war, the French and

English are depicted as decrepit outworn peoples, degenerate Romans, etc., whereas the Germans are the young blood of the world. The British play out-of-door games,—a sure sign of effeminacy; whereas the Germans sing, and play on the violin, -sure proofs of manly endowment. The Germans are a "chosen people" and the great men of the past have all been Germans. The most learned author of this school proves that Christ and Dante were Teutonic characters. All of these crotchets have been believed in by the illuminati of Germany, by her professors and doctors, poets, priests, and leaders of thought. Why have they been thus believed? Because they have been handed out by the governmental central authority, by the source of opinion. Folly, blasphemy, or nonsense, when sanctioned by the Government, becomes to the Germans religion. Is it not strange that this nation, endowed with all the talents but one, has been done to death by the lack of that small lynch-pin-political common sense? Their sin has found them out. Their one weakness has ruined all the fabric of their strength.

In Germany the State appoints the professors in the universities; and thus during the last thirty years of the military ascendancy, only militants have been appointed. There has been no future

for learned men unless they favoured militarism. And nevertheless a certain ancient prestige hung about the skirts of learning which the government sought to use when the war broke out. The Kaiser, therefore, fired off all the guns of culture in a sort of parlour salute, in which incense was used instead of gun-powder. There is probably not a name of note in German letters which is not to be found at the bottom of a war-cry, or of a cry for blood and vengeance. The savagery of these literary tricoteuses which has so shocked the world comes from their indorsement of whatever is being done by the military. Thus, one reads in one column of a newspaper that the Germans have deported into Germany forty-five hundred French boys between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, drawing them from Noyon and other French towns under German occupation. One thinks of how the parents of these boys must feel; one wonders what century one is living in; one recalls the words of Bismarck, that the Prussians must "bleed France white." One remembers Bernhardi's remarks that France must be so weakened that she can "never cross our path again." In another column of the same paper there is a passionate threnody of the poet Wolfkehl, saying that "the war came from God"; that its purpose is "to save

the European soul," and that its horrors are necessary. Of all these horrors the words of the poet are the worst.

This war has been made by the intellectuals; the philosophy of it is a study-bred thing, like the new German bomb-shells. That philosophy of destruction, which lies beneath both the siegeguns and the pamphlets, is a tissue of super-sophistications, by which the old-time and gross passions of murder, theft, lust, hatred, and a certain nameless cruelty (which is new to the world and worse than all the rest), have been let loose on those nations which happen to live next to Germany. The hell of an insane sophistication burns behind this war in the German universities; and the hell of murdered women and children walks before it through Belgium. This war and its literature are all one thing. We must watch both of them to get a vision of modern Germany. When we see the total populations of cities fleeing before the advance of the German Army in Belgium, we must examine the creed of the learned Teuton.

Crack open a bit of Germany anywhere. Doctor Lenard, Professor of Physics at Heidelberg, thinks that Westminster Abbey and the tomb of Shakespeare ought to be destroyed. The brain of a people is ignited and is burning up with the