the world, and the most influential and insolent military caste.  Three times since 1864 she has waged war in Europe, and each time she has added to her territory without regard to the wishes of the annexed population.  For twenty-five years she has exhibited a keen desire to obtain colonial possessions; and since 1896 she has been aggressive in this field.  In her schools and universities the children and youth have been taught for generations that Germany is surrounded by hostile peoples, that her expansion in Europe and in other continents is resisted by jealous powers which started earlier in the race for foreign possessions, and that the salvation of Germany has depended from the first, and will depend till the last, on the efficiency of her army and navy and the warlike spirit of her people.  This instruction, given year after year by teachers, publicists, and rulers, was first generally accepted in Prussia, but now seems to be accepted by the entire empire as unified in 1871.

The attention of the civilized world was first called to this state of the German mind and will by the triumphant policies of Bismarck; but during the reign of the present Emperor the external aggressiveness of Germany and her passion for world empire have grown to much more formidable proportions.  Although the German Emperor has sometimes played the part of a peacemaker, he has habitually acted the war lord in both speech and bearing, and has supported the military caste whenever it has been assailed.  He is by inheritance, conviction, and practice a Divine-right sovereign whose throne rests on an “invincible” army, an army conterminous with the nation.  In the present tremendous struggle he carries his subjects with him in a rushing torrent of self-sacrificing patriotism.  Mass fanaticism and infectious enthusiasm seem to have deprived the leading class in Germany, for the moment, of all power to see, reason, and judge correctly—­no new phenomenon in the world, but instructive in this case because it points to the grave defect in German education—­the lack of liberty and, therefore, practice in self-control.

The twentieth century educated German is, however, by no means given over completely to material and physical aggrandizement and the worship of might.  He cherishes a partly new conception of the State as a collective entity whose function is to develop and multiply, not the free, healthy, and happy individual man and woman, but higher and more effective types of humanity, made superior by a strenuous discipline which takes much account of the strong and ambitious, and little of the weak or meek.  He rejects the ethics of the Beatitudes as unsound, but accepts the religion of valor, which exalts strength, courage, endurance, and the ready sacrifice by the individual of liberty, happiness, and life itself for Germany’s honor and greatness.  A nation of 60,000,000 holding these philosophical and religious views, and proposing to act on them in winning by force the empire of the world, threatens civilization with more formidable irruptions of a destroying host than any that history has recorded.  The rush of the German Army into Belgium, France, and Russia and its consequences to those lands have taught the rest of Europe to dread German domination, and—­it is to be hoped—­to make it impossible.