When a German conscript enters the army he takes the Fahneneid (oath on, and to, the flag), which binds him to defend the Fatherland with bayonet and bullet.  In like manner it may be said that German professors are bound by the Staatseid either to discreet silence, or to employ their intellectual pop-guns in defending Germany.  That these pop-guns fire colossal untruths, innuendoes, word-twistings, and such like missiles, giving out gases calculated to stupefy and blind honest judgments, will become painfully evident in the course of our considerations.

That any and every German obeys the impulse to defend his country is just and praiseworthy; but in our search for truth we are compelled to note the fact that German professors are merely intellectual soldiers fighting for Germany.  Without departing from the truth by one jot or tittle, readers may even call them “outside clerks” of the German Foreign Office, or the “ink-slingers” under the command of the German State.

These premises have been laid down in extenso because some fifty books will be discussed in this work, which emanate from German universities.  A neutral reader may retort:  You also are not impartial, for you are an Englishman!  Having anticipated the question, the author ventures to give an answer.  If he could make a destructive attack on Britain’s policy—­the attack would be made without the least hesitation.  Such an attack, if proved to the hilt, would bring any man renown, and in the worst case no harm.  But if a German professor launched an attack, based upon incontrovertible facts, against Bethmann-Hollweg and Germany’s policy, that professor would be ruined in time of peace and in all probability imprisoned, or sent to penal servitude in time of war.

Nothing which the present author could write would ever tarnish the reputation of German professors as men of science, but in the narrower limits as historians of the Fatherland and propagandists of the Deutschland-ueber-alles gospel they are tied with fetters for the like of which we should seek in vain at the universities of Great Britain or America.  It would be in the interests of truth and impartiality if every German professor who writes on the “Causes of the World War,” “England’s Conspiracy against Germany,” “The Non-Existence of Belgian Neutrality,” and similar themes, would print the German Staatseid on the front page of his book.  The text of that oath would materially assist his readers in forming an opinion regarding the trustworthiness and impartiality of the professor’s conclusions.

Professor Frank commences his historical sketch of Belgian neutrality with the year 1632, when Cardinal Richelieu proposed that Belgium should be converted into an independent republic.  Doubtless the desire to found a buffer State inspired Richelieu, just as it did the representatives of Prussia, Russia, France, Austria and England when they drew up the treaty guaranteeing Belgium’s neutrality in perpetuity, at the Conference of London, 1839.