Years before the war the Government corralled him for its own.  It gave him social status, in return for which he would do his part to make the citizen an unquestioning, faithful and obedient servant of the State.  As soon as he enters on his duties he becomes a civil servant, since the universities are State institutions.  He takes an oath in which it is stipulated that he will not write or preach or do anything questioning the ways of the State.  His only way to make progress in life, then, is to serve the State, to preach what it wishes preached, to teach history as it wishes history taught.

The history of Prussia is the history of the House of Hohenzollern, and the members of the House, generation after generation, must all be portrayed a& heroes.  There was a striking illustration of this in 1913 when the Kaiser had Hauptmann’s historical play suppressed because it represented Frederick William III. in true light, as putty in the hands of Napoleon.

There is a small group of German professors interested solely in scientific research, such as Professor Roentgen and the late Professor Ehrlich, which we exclude from the “puppet professors.”  Such men succeed through sheer ability and their results are their diplomas before the world.  Neither shoulder-knots nor medals pinned in rows across their breasts would contribute one iota to their success, nor make that success the more glittering once it is achieved.

One of these, a Bavarian of the old school, a thoughtful, liberal man who had travelled widely, told me that he deplored the depths of mental slavery to which the mass of the German professors had sunk.  “They are living on the reputation made by us scientists,” he declared.  “They write volumes and they go about preaching through the land, but they contribute nothing, absolutely nothing, to the uplifting of humanity and of the country.”  He told me of how Government spies before the war and during it watch professors who are suspected of having independent ways of thought, and for the slightest “offence” such as being in the audience of a Social Democratic lecture (this before the war, of course; such meetings are forbidden now) they are put on the official black-list and promotion is closed to them for ever.

In warring Germany I found professors vying with one another to sow hatred among the people, to show that Germany is always right, and that she is fighting a war of defence, which she tried to avoid by every means in her power, and that any methods employed to crush Great Britain, the real instigator of the attack on Germany, are good methods.

With the pastors, they spread the idea that “Germany is the rock selected by Almighty God upon which to build His Empire.”  J. P. Bang, the able Danish Professor of Theology at the University of Copenhagen, writes clearly on this point.  He says, when describing Emanuel Geibel:—­

“He has succeeded in finding the classical formula for the German arrogance, which of necessity demands that Germanism shall be placed above everything else in the world, and at the same time in giving this arrogance such an expression that it shall not conflict with the German demand for moral justification.  This has been achieved in the lines which have been quoted times without number in the newest German war literature: