Those who knew only the old and pleasant Germany do not realise the speeding up of the hate machine that has taken place in the last decade.  The protests against this State creation of hate grow less and less as the war proceeds.  To-day only comparatively few members of the Social-Democrat Party raise objection to this horrible contamination of the minds of the coming generation of German men and women.  Not much reflection is needed to see on what fruitful soil the great National Liberal Party, with its backing of capitalists, greedy merchants, chemists, bankers, ship and mine owners, is planting its seeds for the future.  There is no cure for this evil state of affairs, but the practical proof, inflicted by big cannon, that the world will not tolerate a nation of which the very children are trained to hate the rest of the world, and taught that German Kultur must be spread by bloodshed and terror.

With the change in Germany has come a change in the family life.  The good influence of some churches has gone completely.  They are part of the great war machine.  The position of the mother is not what it was.  The old German Hausfrau of the three K’s, which I will roughly translate by “Kids, Kitchen, and Kirk,” has become even more a servant of the master of the house than she was.  The State has taken control of the souls of her children, and she has not even that authority that she had twenty years ago.  The father has become even more important than of yore.  The natural tendency of a nation of which almost every man is a soldier, is to elevate the man at the expense of the woman, and the German woman has taken to her new position very readily.  She plays her wonderful part in the production of munitions, not as in Britain in a spirit of equality, but with a sort of admitted inferiority difficult to describe exactly.

At four years of age the German male child begins to be a soldier.  At six he is accustomed to walk in military formation.  This system has a few advantages, but many disadvantages.  A great concourse of infants can, for example, be marshalled through the streets of a city without any trouble at all.  But that useful discipline is more than counterbalanced by the killing of individuality.  German children, especially during the war, try to grow up to be little men and women as quickly as possible.  They have shared the long working hours of the grown-ups, and late in the hot summer nights I have seen little Bavarian boys and girls who have been at school from seven and worked in the fields from three o’clock till dark, drinking their beer in the beer garden with a relish that showed they needed some stimulant.  The beer is not Bass’s ale, but it contains from two to five per cent. of alcohol.  Unhealthy-looking little men are these German boys of from twelve to fifteen during the war.  The overwork, and the lowering of the diet, has given them pasty faces and dark rings round their eyes.  All games and amusements have been abandoned, and the only relaxation is corps marching through the streets at night, singing their hate songs and “Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles.”