What we have received from her so long that it has become almost a matter of instinct is less dazzling flashes than an equal and constant light.  And the savants, the university men who bring to us anthropological romances, history stuffed with legends and personal prejudices, sociology constructed in contempt of the facts!

In these later days we have seen all these joining under the guidance of their most illustrious members to address the civilized nations in an appeal in which by virtue of their quality as savants they undertook to pronounce upon facts which they don’t understand, to deny those which they cannot help understanding, and solemnly to declare that it is not true that Germany has violated the neutrality of the territory of Belgium.  For proof of this, nothing but their word of honor.  Do they take us for those young gentlemen who said to Monge, “Professor, give us your word of honor that this theorem is true and we will excuse you from the demonstration of it”?

Fully to explain the role of the intellectual savants and university men in the formation of the ideology of caste which prevails among the Germans it would be necessary to recite the history of instruction in Germany, not such as Davis and Paulson have written it, but such as it actually is under the influence of institutions and programmes—­I mean the moral history of instruction.

The great Frederick was wont to cry, “I commence by taking; afterward I shall always have pedants enough to establish my rights.”  Pedants or not, the members of the teaching corps of every grade in Germany are a wheel of the State, their mission is to form not men, but Germans, to inculcate the national idea.  Their views have penetrated even to the common people.

Germany receives a double education—­that of the school and that of the barracks.  The spirit of these two institutions is the same, and their influence, which has been exercised since 1848 in opposition to humanitarian and internationalist ideas, has encountered no serious obstacles, for it went readily with certain old instincts which it was not difficult to reawaken and which general circumstances favored.

“Latrocinia nullam habent infamiam,” said Caesar, speaking of the Germans.  Pillage brings no shame.  This desire of gain, this positive and realistic tendency is one of the motives which the brusque and prodigious economic expansion of Germany has promoted in the most efficient manner.

This total assimilation of a people of 70,000,000 of souls by an aristocratic, almost a feudal, directing class, a combination of plutocrats and militarists, is in reality a most curious phenomenon, more than curious, in a sense grandiose, and in any case full of suggestions and menaces.

Surrender of body and soul, confidence almost religious, enthusiastic faith, the directing class has conquered everything within in order to conquer everything without.  Now it stakes everything upon the cast of the dice.  I have not undertaken to decide whether it is just or not.  The event will determine whether it is genius or madness.