In the second place, war necessarily ignores moral laws.  Respect for laws, treaties, conventions, loyalty, good faith, sentiment and honor, scruples, nobility of soul generosity—­these are mere fetters.  The God-people do not recognize them.  It will then, without hesitation, violate the rights of neutrals if it is to its interest.  It will use falsehood, perfidy, treachery.  It will justify itself by futile pretexts in committing the most atrocious acts—­bombardment of undefended cities, massacre of old men, women and children; barbarous torture, pillage and assassination; bestiality to women; organized incendiarism; methodical destruction of monuments which, by their history and their antiquity and by the admiration of the world, would seem to be inviolable.  “I am told:  I must avenge myself.”  This reason suffices.  We are told that some inhabitant of one city or another has been wanting in respect toward one of our men.  Therefore we must burn the city and show the inhabitants what we have.  Definitively, our duty is to let loose the elementary energies of nature as far as possible to attain the maximum force and the maximum of result.

The effect should, moreover, be psychological as well as material.  Actions which seem horrible to man and which spread terror are commendable means, because they break the spirit even if they have no value from a military point of view.  Moreover, what offends common morality is conformed to transcendent morality.  The mission of the Germans at war is to punish.  They work Divine vengeance.  They compel their enemies to expiate the crime of resisting them.  After they have taken a city, if the enemy has the insolence to take it back, it is just that they shall sack that city if possible, killing its inhabitants and burning its finest monuments.

Barbarity Multiplied by Science.

Given this problem, how to let loose most widely the powers of evil, it is clear that a people of superior culture is better equipped than any other to resolve that problem.  In fact, science, where it excels, can work destruction and evil with the very forces which nature employs only to create light, heat, life, and beauty.  The God-people therefore unites the maximum of science to the maximum of barbarity.  The formula of its action may be thus written:  “Barbarity multiplied by science.”

This is the last word of the famous doctrine of Germanism.  Now the identity of the ultimate consequences of the doctrine and the features which the present war presents is evident.  The problem which we undertook is, therefore, solved.  If, contrary to all likelihood, barbarity co-exists with culture in the Germans; if in the present war it appears to be absolutely bound up in that culture, the reason is that German culture differs profoundly from what humanity understands by culture and civilization.  Human civilization tries to humanize war.  German culture tends indefinitely to increase its primitive brutality by science.