from every side—­thoughts which Germany had suffered to sleep among her poets and philosophers, every one which could lend a seductive or striking form to a conviction already made!  Henceforth German imperialism had a theory of its own.  Taught in schools and universities, it easily moulded to itself a nation already broken-in to passive obedience and having no loftier ideal wherewith to oppose the official doctrine.  Many persons have explained the aberrations of German policy as due to that theory.  For my part, I see in it nothing more than a philosophy doomed to translate into ideas what was, in its essence, insatiable ambition and will perverted by pride.  The doctrine is an effect rather than a cause; and should the day come when Germany, conscious of her moral humiliation, shall say, to excuse herself, that she had trusted herself too much to certain theories, that an error of judgment is not a crime, it will then be necessary to remind her that her philosophy was simply a translation into intellectual terms of her brutality, her appetites, and her vices.  So, too, in most cases, doctrines are the means by which nations and individuals seek to explain what they are and what they do.  Germany, having finally become a predatory nation, invokes Hegel as witness; just as a Germany enamoured of moral beauty would have declared herself faithful to Kant, just as a sentimental Germany would have found her tutelary genius in Jacobi or Schopenhauer.  Had she leaned in any other direction and been unable to find at home the philosophy she needed, she would have procured it from abroad.  Thus when she wished to convince herself that predestined races exist, she took from France, that she might hoist him into celebrity, a writer whom we have not read—­Gobineau.

None the less is it true that perverse ambition, once erected into theory, feels more at ease in working itself out to the end; a part of the responsibility will then be thrown upon logic.  If the German race is the elect, it will be the only race which has an unconditional right to live; the others will be tolerated races, and this toleration will be precisely what is called “the state of peace.”  Let war come; the annihilation of the enemy will be the end Germany has to pursue.  She will not strike at combatants only; she will massacre women, children, old men; she will pillage and burn; the ideal will be to destroy towns, villages, the whole population.  Such is the conclusion of the theory.  Now we come to its aim and true principle.

As long as war was no more than a means to the settlement of a dispute between two nations, the conflict was localized to the two armies involved.  More and more of useless violence was eliminated; innocent populations were kept outside the quarrel.  Thus little by little a code of war was drawn up.  From the first, however, the Prussian army, organized as it was for conquest, did not take kindly to this law.  But from the time when Prussian militarism,