“This theory becomes confusing to the student reared in other nations under different educational influences.  It indicates beyond contradiction that Germany feels no sense of duty toward other nations, but only an obligation to further her own interests.

“Germany has immense patriotism but no humanitarianism.  Her only duty is to herself.  Her national egotism can be characterized by no other word than selfishness.

“It is a curious phenomenon that at a time when humanitarianism in its broadest sense has become the keynote of all other of the great nations it has not become at all the keynote of German civilization.”

Teutonic Superexcitation.

“It is impossible that such pride, such a sense of arrogant national superiority as that which marks Germany, should maintain among a democratic people; it is possible only to a very aristocratic country.  What has happened is its logical outgrowth in the country which it has infected.

“In Germany this sense of national pride, of intolerance of others, even of contempt for others, has been developed until it amounts to superexcitation.  It not only affects Germany’s relations to other peoples, but it affects the relations of Germans to one another.

“Different classes of the German population continually exhibit it in their dealings with one another.

“It is continually illustrated in those events which have been the wonder of visiting foreigners—­episodes of the contemptuous ill-treatment of subordinate German soldiers by their superiors.  It goes beyond that, manifesting itself in the treatment of all civilians by the lowest soldier, and, further still, in the attitude even of the lowest civilian to all foreigners, even the highest.

“The German individual may not consider himself superior to all individuals of other nationalities, but he will be sure to consider his nation so far superior to every other that there can be no comparison between it and them.  His is a peculiar arrogance.  It is not at all personal; it is purely national; but none the less it is arrogance, and all arrogance is dangerous.

“A hierarchy always exists in aristocratic countries; the hierarchical idea has been developed further in Germany than elsewhere.

“This has given Germany an unfortunate impulse.  If to this impulse we add that other born of all her various victories since 1866, especially those which were won while Germany was realizing Bismarck’s dream of triumph ’through fire and blood’—­her industrial victories, her scientific advance, her social progress—­and consider the Germanic tendency toward egotism, we do not find ourselves surprised when we find, examine, and appraise exactly what we have today in Germany.

“The perversion of national sentiment into national arrogance has been the definite, although, perhaps, unrealized and unintended, aim of every educational influence which has been at work in Germany since 1870.  It has amounted to an unparalleled perversion of a nation’s sentiment toward all the outside world.