An additional cause of the love of peace, besides those which are rooted in the very soul of the German people, is the wish not to be disturbed in commercial life.

The Germans are born business men, more than any others in the world.  Even before the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, Germany was perhaps the greatest trading Power in the world, and in the last forty years Germany’s trade has made marvellous progress under the renewed expansion of her political power.  Notwithstanding our small stretch of coast-line, we have created in a few years the second largest merchant fleet in the world, and our young industries challenge competition with all the great industrial States of the earth.  German trading-houses are established all over the world; German merchants traverse every quarter of the globe; a part, indeed, of English wholesale trade is in the hands of Germans, who are, of course, mostly lost to their own country.  Under these conditions our national wealth has increased with rapid strides.

Our trade and our industries—­owners no less than employes—­do not want this development to be interrupted.  They believe that peace is the essential condition of commerce.  They assume that free competition will be conceded to us, and do not reflect that our victorious wars have never disturbed our business life, and that the political power regained by war rendered possible the vast progress of our trade and commerce.

Universal military service, too, contributes to the love of peace, for war in these days does not merely affect, as formerly, definite limited circles, but the whole nation suffers alike.  All families and all classes have to pay the same toll of human lives.  Finally comes the effect of that universal conception of peace so characteristic of the times—­the idea that war in itself is a sign of barbarism unworthy of an aspiring people, and that the finest blossoms of culture can only unfold in peace.

Under the many-sided influence of such views and aspirations, we seem entirely to have forgotten the teaching which once the old German Empire received with “astonishment and indignation” from Frederick the Great, that “the rights of States can only be asserted by the living power”; that what was won in war can only be kept by war; and that we Germans, cramped as we are by political and geographical conditions, require the greatest efforts to hold and to increase what we have won.  We regard our warlike preparations as an almost insupportable burden, which it is the special duty of the German Reichstag to lighten so far as possible.  We seem to have forgotten that the conscious increase of our armament is not an inevitable evil, but the most necessary precondition of our national health, and the only guarantee of our international prestige.  We are accustomed to regard war as a curse, and refuse to recognize it as the greatest factor in the furtherance of culture and power.