It is not by arms but by arguments and facts that economists like us, faithful to the teachings of the physiocrats and of Adam Smith, have sought to protect ourselves against it.  On the eve of the war, at the inauguration of Turgot’s Monument, we set forth his ideas of liberty and humanity in opposition to the German realpolitik.  We hope that the present events will cure those among our professors whom it had contaminated, and that they will cease to constitute themselves accomplices of that, form of Pan-Germanism which they introduced to public opinion and to our legislation.  The acts of your diplomatists and of your Generals, and the approbation given them by you and other representatives of German science, are a terrible demonstration, but conclusive, of the dangers and vanity of German culture.  You are its true destroyers.

Militarism and Civilization.

“Without our miltarism,” say you, “our civilization would have been annihilated long ago.”  And you invoke the inheritance of Goethe, Beethoven, Kant.  But Goethe, born in the free city of Frankfort, lived at the Court of Charles Augustus, which was a liberal and artistic centre ever threatened by Prussia.  But Beethoven was of Flemish origin, and lived in Holland until the age of twenty-four, spending the rest of his life in Vienna, and he has nothing in common with Prussian militarism, so redoubtable for Austria.  But Kant, if he was born and lived at Koenisberg, the true capital of the Prussian Kingdom, welcomed the French Revolution, and when he died in 1804 it was not Prussian militarism which had recommended his writings to the world.

But the solidarity which you establish between German militarism and German culture, of which you and your colleagues claim to be the representatives, is a proof of the confusion of German conceptions.

To present Goethe, Beethoven, and Kant to the world you surround them with bayonets.  In the same manner every tradesman and every merchant throughout Germany has got into the habit of saying:  “I have four million bayonets behind me!” Your Emperor said to some tradesmen who complained of bad business:  “I must travel!” And he went to Constantinople; he went to Tangier, after the speech at Bremen.  In every one of his words, in each of his gestures, he affirmed the subordination of economic civilization to military civilization.  He considered that it was his duty to open up markets and assert the value of German products with cannon and sword.  Hence his formidable armaments, his perpetual threats which held all nations in a constant state of anxiety.

There is the deep and true cause of the war.  And it is due entirely to your Emperor and his environment.  We readily understand that the greater number of “representatives of German science and art” who signed the appeal are incapable of fathoming this fact; but this is not your case, you who denounced the abuses and consequences of German protectionism, and we remember that at the Antwerp Congress you agreed with us in recognizing its aggressive nature.