This brings us to a fundamental point of difference between the two peoples.  The close association between culture and militarism, between the best minds of the nation and the mind of the Government, does not seem unnatural to a modern German at all.  On the contrary, it seems the most natural thing in the world.  It is the bedrock of the German system of national education.  Culture to a German is not only a national possession; it is also, to a degree difficult for us to appreciate, a State product.  It is a national possession deliberately handed on by the State from generation to generation, hall-marked and guaranteed, as it were, for the use of its citizens.  When we use the word “culture” we speak of it as an attribute of individual men and women.  Germans, on the other hand, think of it as belonging to nations as a whole, in virtue of their system of national education.  That is why they are so sure that all Germans possess culture.  They have all had it at school.  And it is all the same brand of culture, because no other is taught.  It is the culture with which the Government wishes its citizens to be equipped.  That is why all Germans tend, not only to know the same facts (and a great many facts too), but to have a similar outlook on life and similar opinions about Goethe, Shakespeare and the German Navy.  Culture, like military service, is a part of the State machinery.

Here we come upon the connecting link between culture and militarism.  Both are parts of the great German system of State education.  “Side by side with the influences of German education,” wrote Dr. Sadler in 1901,[1] “are to be traced the influences of German military service.  The two sets of influence interact on one another and intermingle.  German education impregnates the German army with science.  The German army predisposes German education to ideas of organisation and discipline.  Military and educational discipline go hand in hand....  Both are preserved and fortified by law and custom, and by administrative arrangements skilfully devised to attain that end.  But behind all the forms of organisation (which would quickly crumble away unless upheld by and expressing some spiritual force), behind both military and educational discipline, lies the fundamental principle adopted by Scharnhorst’s Committee on Military organisation in Prussia in 1807:  ’All the inhabitants of the State are its defenders by birth.’”

[Footnote 1:  Board of Education Special Reports, vol. ix. p. 43.]

At last we have reached the root of the matter.  It is not German culture which is the source and centre of the ideas to which Great Britain is opposed:  nor yet is it German militarism.  Our real opponent is the system of training and education, out of which both German culture and German militarism spring.  It is the organisation of German public life, and the “spiritual force” of which that organisation is the outward and visible expression.