In everything the Germans must be unique—­in their women, their God, their wine, their loyalty.  The war which the Germans wage against us strikes the world with horror and terror, because it is in the full force of the term “the German way, die deutsche Art, the German war.”

As the world recognizes this astonishing proposition it asks with anxiety, what may be its future relations to Germany?  Knowingly and systematically, Germany opposes to all Hellenic, Christian, humane civilizations the devastating theory of the Huns.  True, after the war she will claim that she has done nothing but conform, often with pain, to the conditions of ideal and divine war, and she will appear willing to pardon to her enemies the cruelties she has had to inflict upon them.  Decidedly, the world will refuse to admire this horrible magnanimity which on the first impulse of resistance becomes savagery.  Today the veil is torn away.  German culture is shown to be a scientific barbarity.  The world, which means in the future to rid itself of all despotism, will not compromise with the despotism of barbarity.

But what a disappointment and what a grief!  Formerly, Germany was held to be a great nation.  Its praises were sounded in many a land of solid and high culture.  The German tradition once held other doctrines than those we have now seen devolop under the hands of Prussia.  Germanism, as the Prussians formulate it, consists essentially in contempt for all other nations and in the pretension of domination.  But Leibnitz—­as highly esteemed in the Latin world as in the German—­professed a philosophy which valued unity only under the form of harmony between free and autonomous forces.  Leibnitz exalted the multiple, the diverse, the spontaneous.  Between rival powers he sought to establish relations which would reconcile them without changing or diminishing the value or independence of any of them.  Witness his effort at the reunion of the Catholic and Protestant Churches.  After Leibnitz came Kant.  He certainly was very much of a German.  He owned, nevertheless, that he had learned from Rousseau to honor the common man who, not being a savant, possesses moral value far above the savant, who has no merit but science.  And, starting from the principle that every person, so far as he is capable of moral value, is entitled to respect, he urged men to create not a universal and despotic monarchy but a republic of nations in which each should possess a free and independent personality.

This willingness to put liberty before unity, and respect and honor the dignity of other nations while at the same time serving its own, was not extinguished in Germany with Leibnitz and Kant.  Permit me, my dear Director, on this subject to indulge in some personal reminiscences.

Treitschke Versus Bluntschli.