Our princely houses are as old as our monasteries, our cities, and our cathedrals.  A thousand years ago the Guelphs were a celebrated family, and the Wettins have ruled over their lands for eight centuries.  In the twelfth century the Wittelsbachs and Thuringians were Princes under the great Kaisers of the Hohenstaufen dynasty.  Among these great families the Hapsburgs (thirteenth century) and the Hohenzollerns (fifteenth century) are quite young.  All have their roots in Germany and belong to the country.

We glory in our Princes.  They link our existence with the earliest centuries of our history.  They preserve for us the priceless independence of our small home States.

We are accused of militarism.  What is this new and terrible crime?  Since the years of the wars of liberation against France and Napoleon we have had what amounts practically to universal conscription.  Only two generations later universal suffrage was introduced.  The nation has been sternly trained by its history in the ways of discipline and self-restraint.  Germans are very far from mistaking freedom for license and independence for licentiousness.

Germany has a long past.  She enjoys the inheritance of an original and priceless civilization.  She holds clearly formulated ideals.  To the future she has all this to bequeath and, in addition, the intellectual wealth of her present stage of development.  Consider Germany’s contributions to the arts, the poetical achievements of the period of Schiller and Goethe, the music of Handel, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; the thought systems of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel!

The last decade has reawakened these great men in the consciousness of the German Nation.  Enriched by the consciousness and message of an intellectual past, our people were moving forward to new horizons.

At that moment the war hit us.  If you could only have lived these weeks in Germany I do not doubt that what you would have seen would have led your ripe experience to a fervent faith in a Divinely guided future of mankind.  The great spiritual movement of 1870, when I was a boy growing up, was but a phantom compared to July and August of 1914.  Germany was a nation stirred by the most sacred emotions, humble and strong, filled with just wrath and a firm determination to conquer—­a nation disciplined, faithful, and loving.

In that disposition we have gone to war and still fight.  As for the slanders of which we have been the victims, ask the thousands of Frenchmen who housed German soldiers in 1870 and 1871, or ask the Belgians of Ghent and Bruges!  They will give you a different picture of the “Furor Teutonicus.”  They will tell you that the “raging German” generally is a good-natured fellow, ever ready for service and sympathy, who, like Parsifal, gazes forth eagerly into a strange world which the war has opened to his loyal and patriotic vision.

KARL LAMPRECHT.