hope it will tranquillize them to remember that if this happens, we can have a million good soldiers to defend each of our frontiers.  At the same time we can keep in the rear reserves of half a million and more, of a million even, and we can push these forward as they are needed.  I have been told, “That will only result in the others going still higher.”  But they cannot.  They have long ago reached their limits....  In numbers they have gone as high as we, but in quality they cannot compete with us.  Bravery, of course, is equal among all civilized nations; the Russian and the Frenchman fight as bravely as the German:  but our men, our 700,000 new men, have seen service; they are soldiers who have served their time, and who have not yet forgotten their training.  Besides—­and this is a point in which no people in the world can compete with us—­we have the material for officers and under-officers to command this enormous army.  It is here that competition is excluded, because it involves a peculiarly broad extension of popular culture, such as exists in Germany and in no other country....

There is a further advantage that will result from the adoption of this law:  the very strength at which we are aiming necessarily makes us peaceful.  That sounds paradoxical, but it is true.  With the powerful machine which we are making of the German army no aggression will be attempted.  If I saw fit—­assuming a different situation to exist from that which in my conviction does exist’—­to come before you here to-day and say to you, “We are seriously menaced by France and Russia; the prospect is that we shall be attacked:  such at least is my conviction, as a diplomatist, on the basis of the military information that we have received; it is to our advantage to defend ourselves by anticipating the attack, and to strike at once; an offensive war is a better one for us to wage, and I accordingly ask the Imperial Diet for a credit of a milliard or half a milliard, in order to undertake to-day the war against our two neighbors,”—­well, gentlemen, I do not know whether you would have such confidence in me as to grant such a request.  I hope not.  But if you did, it would not be enough for me.  If we in Germany desire to wage a war with the full effect of our national power, it must be a war with which all who help to wage it, and all who make sacrifices for it—­with which, in a word, all the nation—­must be in sympathy.  It must be a people’s war; it must be a war that is carried on with the same enthusiasm as that of 1870, when we were wickedly attacked.  I remember still the joyful shouts that rang in our ears at the Cologne station; it was the same thing from Berlin to Cologne; it was the same thing here in Berlin.  The waves of popular approval bore us into the war, whether we liked it or not.  So it must be, if a national force like ours is to be brought fully into operation.  It will be very difficult, however, to make it clear to the provinces, to the federal