the rant of scolding professors with their final reckonings, their Weltpolitik, and their Godless theories of the Superman who stands above morality and to whom all humanity shall be subservient.  Instead of the world-inspiring phrases of a Goethe or a Schiller, what are the words in the last decade which have been quoted across the sea?  Are they not always the ever-recurring words of wrath from one ill-balanced man?  “Strike them with the mailed fist.”  “Leave such a name behind you as Attila and his Huns.”  “Turn your weapons even upon your own flesh and blood at my command.”  These are the messages which have come from this perversion of a nation’s soul.

A Mighty Despotism.

But the matter lies deep.  The Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs have used their peoples as a great landowner might use the serfs upon his estate.  It was, and is, their openly expressed theory that they were in their position by the grace of God, that they owed no reckoning to any man, and that kingdom and folk were committed for better or worse to their charge.  Round this theory of the Dark Ages there gathered all the forces of the many courts of the empire, all the nobility who make so huge a class in Germanic countries, all the vast army to whom strict discipline and obedience were the breath of life, all the office-holders of the State, all the purveyors of warlike stores.  These and their like were the natural setting to such a central idea.  Court influence largely controlled the teaching at school and universities, and so the growing twig could be bent.  But all these forces together could not have upheld so dangerous and unnatural a theory had it not been for the influence of a servile press.  How that press was managed, how the thoughts of the people could be turned to the right or the left with the same precision as a platoon of grenadiers, has been shown clearly enough in the memoirs of Bismarck.  Public opinion was poisoned at its very roots.  The average citizen lived in a false atmosphere where everything was distorted to his vision.  He saw his Kaiser, not as an essentially weak and impetuous man with a dangerous entourage who were ever at his ear, but as Germany personified, an angel with a flaming sword, beating back envious assailants from the beloved Fatherland.  He saw his neighbors not as peaceful nations who had no possible desire to attack him, but on the contrary lived in constant fear of him, but as a band, of envious and truculent conspirators who could only be kept in order by the sudden stamp of the jackboot and the menacing clatter of the sabre.  He insensibly imbibed the Nietzsche doctrine that the immorality of the Superman may be as colossal as his strength and that the slave-evangel of Christianity was superseded by a sterner law.  Thus, when he saw acts which his reason must have told him were indefensible he was still narcotized by this conception of some new standard of right.  He saw his Kaiser at the time of a petty humiliation to Great Britain