That is why this War has been our war from the beginning, though we have entered it so late.  As we look back upon the struggle of Athens and the other free Greek cities with the overwhelming hordes of Asia, at Marathon and Salamis, as the conflict that saved democracy for Europe and made possible the civilization of the Occident, so it is probable that the world will look back upon this colossal War as the same struggle, multiplied a thousand times in the men and munitions employed, the struggle determining the future of democracy and civilization for generations, perhaps for all time.

II

THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS IN THE WAR

The world has been confused as to the issue in this War, because of the multitude of its causes and of the antagonisms it involves; yet under all the national and racial hatreds, the economic jealousies, certain great ideas are being tested out.

Apologists for Germany have told us, even with pride, that in Germany the supreme conception is the dedication of Man to the State.  This was not true of old Germany.  Before the formation of the Prussian empire, her spirit was intensely individualistic.  She stood preeminently for freedom of thought and action.  It was this that gave her noble spiritual heritage.  Goethe is the most individualistic of world masters.  Froebel developed, in the Kindergarten, one of the purest of democracies.  Luther and German protestantism represented the affirmation of individual conscience as against hierarchical control.  It was this spirit that gave Germany her golden age of literature, her unmatched group of spiritual philosophers, her religious teachers, her pre-eminence in music.

Nevertheless, the Prussian state, autocratic from its inception, received philosophic justification in a series of thinkers, culminating in Hegel, who regarded the individual as a capricious egotist, the state, incarnate in its sovereign, as the supreme spiritual entity.  He justified war, regarding it as a permanent necessity, and practically made might, right, in arguing that a conquering nation is justified by its more fruitful idea in annexing the weaker, while the conquered, in being conquered, is judged of God.  Here is the philosophic justification of that Prussian arrogance which in Nietzsche is carried into glittering rhetoric.  Thus the Prussian state from afar back was opposed to the general spirit of old Germany.

Since 1870, it must be admitted, that spirit is gone.  With the formation of the Prussian empire and for the half century of its existence, every force of social control—­press, church, state, education, social opinion—­was deliberately employed to stamp on the German people one idea—­the subordination of the individual to the state, as the supreme and only virtue.  How far has the policy succeeded?  Apparently absolutely.  To the outside observer the old spirit seems utterly gone.  How far this policy has been helped by the cultivation of the fear of the Slav, one cannot say.  Looking at the map of Europe, one sees that the geographical relation of Germany to the great Slavic empire is not unlike the relation of Holland to Germany.  Thus the deliberate fostering of fear of the vast empire of the East has done much to strengthen the hands of the Prussian regime in its chosen task.