The standard of mechanical efficiency as it was set by Germany was one of refined brutality.  During the progress of the war, the significance of that standard is being grafted into the consciousness of the common people of those nations which have opposed Germany in arms.  It is the industrial efficiency of Germany, uninhibited by a sense of human development that has made her victories possible.  It is that efficiency which has kept a large part of the world on the defensive for over three and a half years.  Germany’s military strategy is, in the main, her industrial strategy; it represents her efficiency in turning technology to the account of an imperial purpose.

But those organizations of manufacturers and business politicians who believe that the same schemes of efficiency will function in America will call upon the people after the war, it is safe to predict, to emulate the methods which have given Germany its untoward strength.  While it is these methods which have made much hated Germany a menace to the world and while the menace is felt by our own people, the significance of the methods is but vaguely realized.  It is probable that after the war it will be said that it was not the German methods which were objectionable, but that it was their use in an international policy.  Before the time for reconstruction comes, I hope we shall discover how intrinsically false those methods are; and how untrue to the growth process is the sort of efficiency Germany has developed.  I hope also that we shall realise that a policy of paternalism has no place in the institutional life of our own country.  Before the war these German methods bore the character of high success, and they had a large following in this country.  There are indeed many thousands of men and women in the United States, who, while giving all they most care for, for the prosecution of the war against Germany still support industrial and political policies and dogmas which are in spirit essentially Prussian.  The professional Reformer here in America is not even yet fully conscious that German paternalism (a phase of German efficiency) is the token of an enslaved people.

The German educational system as much if not more than its other imperial schemes has been instrumental in developing the German brand of industrial efficiency.  The perfection in Germany of its technological processes is made possible as the youth of the country has been consecrated and sacrificed to the development of this perfection in the early years of school training.  Parents contribute their children freely to an educational system which fits them into an industrial institution which has an imperial destiny to fulfill.  Each person’s place in the life of the nation is made for him during his early years, like a predestined fact.