“Excessive patriotism irritates me,” he pursued.  “Hearing people form plans for the definite extinction of Germany seems to me like listening to the Pan-Germanists of Berlin when they talk of dividing up the continents.”

Then he summed up his opinion.

“Imperialism will have to be crushed for the sake of the tranquillity of the world; the great war machine which menaces the peace of nations will have to be suppressed.  Since 1870, we have all been living in dread of it.  For forty years, the war has been averted, but in all that time, what apprehension!” . . .

What was most irritating Tchernoff was the moral lesson born of this situation which had ended by overwhelming the world—­the glorification of power, the sanctification of success, the triumph of materialism, the respect for the accomplished fact, the mockery of the noblest sentiments as though they were merely sonorous and absurd phrases, the reversal of moral values . . . a philosophy of bandits which pretended to be the last word of progress, and was no more than a return to despotism, violence, and the barbarity of the most primitive epochs of history.

While he was longing for the suppression of the representatives of this tendency, he would not, therefore, demand the extermination of the German people.

“This nation has great merits jumbled with bad conditions inherited from a not far-distant, barbarous past.  It possesses the genius of organization and work, and is able to lend great service to humanity. . . .  But first it is necessary to give it a douche—­the douche of downfall.  The Germans are mad with pride and their madness threatens the security of the world.  When those who have poisoned them with the illusion of universal hegemony have disappeared, when misfortune has freshened their imagination and transformed them into a community of humans, neither superior nor inferior to the rest of mankind, they will become a tolerant people, useful . . . and who knows but they may even prove sympathetic!”

According to Tchernoff, there was not in existence to-day a more dangerous nation.  Its political organization was converting it into a warrior horde, educated by kicks and submitted to continual humiliations in order that the willpower which always resists discipline might be completely nullified.

“It is a nation where all receive blows and desire to give them to those lower down.  The kick that the Kaiser gives is transmitted from back to back down to the lowest rung of the social ladder.  The blows begin in the school and are continued in the barracks, forming part of the education.  The apprenticeship of the Prussian Crown Princes has always consisted in receiving fisticuffs and cowhidings from their progenitor, the king.  The Kaiser beats his children, the officer his soldiers, the father his wife and children, the schoolmaster his pupils, and when the superior is not able to give blows, he subjects those under him to the torment of moral insult.”