Far be it from me to deny that my country people, male and female, do indeed possess an unusually strong sense of duty.  This is combined with a desire for justice which is so often looked upon by outsiders as a lack of patriotic pride, and with an honesty which easily makes the German appear so clumsy and awkward.  These three characteristics belong indissolubly together and one is not to be thought of without the other.  The spirit from which the German sense of duty arises is what the foreigner so often misunderstands in us.  He generally confuses sense of duty with blind obedience.  But this sense of duty does not originate from a need for submission or from a mental dependence.  No, it rests on a deep philosophical reason and arises from the mental recognition of ethical and national necessity.  That is why it can exist side by side with the most extreme individualism, which also belongs to the peculiarities of the character of our people.  The Germans have always been a nation of thinkers.  Not only the scholar, also the simple worker, the laborer, the modest mother take a deep pleasure in forming their philosophy of life and the world.  Side by side with the loud triumph of our industry goes this quieter existence, which has been rather pushed into the background in the last decades, but has not, therefore, ceased to exist.  And the further the belief in miracles stepped into the background, the more the belief in duty acquired a warm religious tinge.  The loud complaints about the vanishing of the sense of duty among the young, which has so often been voiced by public opinion, only prove how strongly this ethical force was governing people’s minds.  Every seeming diminution of it was felt to be a disastrous endangerment of the knowledge of the people.  We have perhaps acted childishly and foolishly toward other nations by too great confidence.  But in the consciousness of the entire German Nation the ominous feeling was living and working with mighty power, that only if every one of us devotes his entire strength to the post assigned to him, and works until the exhaustion of his last mental and physical power, only then can we as a national whole retain our high level and, surrounded by dangers on all sides, create sufficient room for ourselves to breathe and live.

The Military and the Socialists.

Two mighty organizations exist among us which were opposed to each other until recently—­the military and the Social Democratic.  The world sees with amazement the perfection which has been reached by the military organization of our army.  Its achievements have only become possible through the above-mentioned philosophical conception of the sense of duty which raises it far above any systematic obedience and lets it appear in the light of religious ideal.  Duty becomes in these serious and energetic minds a voluntary adaptation to a carefully organized whole with the knowledge that to serve this whole at the same time produces the highest achievement of