But for our present purpose I must concentrate attention on another institution which has had an even more direct and practical bearing on the character of the German people—­and this is the enforcement of military service.  This, like every other institution, must be judged by its effects on the character of those who are subject to it.  The writer of the letter holds that “the only good thing about the German nation” is the “national service through which all men pass, and which makes soldiers of all not physically unfit, and which inculcates patriotism, loyalty, obedience, courage, discipline, duty.”  Now, these words, read in connexion with the description of the German people quoted above, suggest a puzzling problem.  The Germans are cruel, brutally arrogant, deceitful, and cunning, and “the Prussian will always remain a beast.”  Yet these same people have all passed through a discipline “which inculcates patriotism, loyalty, obedience, courage, discipline, duty.”  Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter?  Does the same system make men patriotic and cruel, loyal and arrogant, obedient and deceitful, courageous and cunning, dutiful and beastly?

Perhaps it does.  I can conceive some of these pairs of qualities united in a single character.  A man might be a zealous patriot, and yet horribly cruel; loyal to his Sovereign, but arrogant to his inferiors; obedient to authority, yet deceitful among coequals; courageous in danger, yet cunning in avoiding it; dutiful according to his own standard of duty, and yet as “beastly” as the torturers of Belgium.  But a system which produces such a very chequered type of character is scarcely to be commended.

Now, the writer might reply, “I only said that the military system inculcated certain virtues.  I did not say that it ensured them.”  Then it fails.  If it has produced only the “vile German race” which the writer so justly dislikes, unredeemed by any of the virtues which it “inculcates,” then it has nothing to say for itself.  It stands confessed as an unmixed evil.

It is right to expose a logical fallacy, but I am not fond of the attempt to obscure by logic-chopping what is a writer’s real meaning.  I will therefore say that, as far as I can make out, what this particular writer really believes is that the German people, through some innate and incurable frowardness of disposition, have turned the inestimable blessings of compulsory soldiership to their own moral undoing, and have made themselves wholly bad and beastly, in spite of a beneficent institution which would have made them good and even pleasant.