But it is the glorification of war—­war aggressive as well as war defensive—­which is the most striking result of the doctrine of the all-sufficing, all-embracing national state.  In the index to Treitschke’s Politik, under the word War, one reads the following headings—­’its sanctity’; ‘to be conceived as an ordinance set by God’; ‘is the most powerful maker of nations’; ‘is politics par excellence’.  Two functions, says Treitschke, the state exists to discharge; and these are to administer law, and to make war.  Of the two war, since it is politics par excellence, would appear to be the greater.  War cannot be thought or wished out of the world:  it is the only medicine for a sick nation.  When we are sunk in the selfish individualism of peace, war comes to make us realize that we are members one of another.  ’Therein lies the majesty of war, that the petty individual altogether vanishes before the great thought of the state.’  War alone makes us realize the social organism to which we belong:  ’it is political idealism which demands war.’  And again, ’what a perversion of morality it were, if one struck out of humanity heroism’(Heldentum)—­as if Heldentum could not exist in peace!  ’But the living God will see to it that war shall always recur as a terrible medicine for humanity.’

Thus the idealization of the state as power results in the idealization of war.  As we have seen that the state must be ‘power’ in order to preserve itself at all, we now find that it must be a war-state to preserve itself from ‘sickness’.  If it does not fight, individualism will triumph over the social organism; heroism will perish out of the world.  Hence Bernhardi writes:  ’the maintenance of peace never can or may be the goal of a policy’.  War, war—­the ‘strong medicine’, the teacher of heroism, and, as Bernhardi adds to Treitschke, the inevitable biological law, the force that spreads the finest culture—­war is the law of humanity.  And this war is offensive as well as defensive—­ primarily, indeed, offensive.  For the growing nation must preserve all its new members in its bosom:  it must not let them slip away by emigration to foreign soils.  It must therefore find for itself colonies; and since the world is already largely occupied, it must find them by conquest from other powers.[182] Treitschke already cried the watchwords—­’Colonies!’ ‘Sea-power to gain colonies!’ Treitschke already designated England as the object of German attack, and began to instil in Germany a hatred of England.  England blocked the way to the growth of Germany from a European into a World-power; Germany, to preserve intact for German culture the surplus of the growing population, must be a World-power or perish.  And besides, England was a ‘sick’ state—­a sham, an hypocrisy.[183]