is to exercise the influence she deserves.”  And a vigorous foreign policy is but another name for the use of the War System as a means of pushing business.  From the daily press of Germany may be culled many choice examples of idle Jingo talk, but analysis of the papers containing it shows their affiliation with the “extreme right,” a small minority in German politics, potent only through the indiscretions of the Crown Prince, and through the fact that the Constitution of Germany gives its people no control over administrative affairs.  The journals of this sort—­the Taegliche Rundschau, the Berliner Post, the Deutsche Tageszeitung, and the Berliner Neueste Nachrichten are the property of Junker reactionists, or else, like the Lokal Anzeiger, the Rheinisch-Westphalische Zeitung, the organs merely of the War trade House of Krupp.  Out from the ruck of hack writers, there stands a single imposing figure, Maximilian Harden, the “poet of German politics,” who “casts forth heroic gestures and thinks of politics in terms of aesthetics, the prophet of a great, strong and saber-rattling nation,” whose force shall be felt everywhere under the sun.

Bloodthirsty pamphlets in numbers, are listed by Nippold.  But the anonymous writers ("Divinator,” “Rhenanus,” “Lookout,” “Deutscher,” “Politiker,” “Activer General” and “Deutscher Officier”) count for less than nothing in personal influence.  They do little more than bay at the moon.

Impressive as Nippold’s list seems at first, and dangerous to the peace of the world, after all one’s final thought is this:  How few they are, and how scant their influence, as compared with the wise, sane, commonsense of sixty millions of German people.  The two great papers that stand for peace and sanity, the Berliner Tageblatt and the Frankfurter Zeitung, with the Muenchener Neueste Nachrichten, are read daily by more Germans than all the reactionary sheets combined.  The Socialist organ Vorwaerts, avowedly opposed to monarchy as well as to militarism, carries farther than all the organs of Pangermanism of whatever kind.

We may justly conclude that the war spirit is not the spirit of Germany, a nation perforce military because the people cannot help themselves.  So far as it goes, it is the spirit of a narrow clique of “sleepless watchdogs” whose influence is waning, and would be non-existent were it not for the military organization which holds Germany by the throat, but which has pushed the German people just as far as it dares.

A second lesson is that while forms of government, and social traditions, may differ, the relation of public opinion towards war is practically the same in all the countries of Western Europe.  It is in its way the test of European civilization.  Each nation has its “sleepless watchdogs,” and those of one nation fire the others, when the proper war scares are set in motion by the great unscrupulous group of those who profit by them.  The war promoters, the apostles of hate, form a brotherhood among themselves, and their success in frightening one nation reacts to make it easier to scare another.