Germany was made by Bismarck and the armies of Von Moltke supporting the Hohenzollern dynasty.  This made Prussia the center of Germany industrially, financially, and as a military power, and at the heart and seat of power, in both industry and finance, sits the same dynasty.  The Emperor is the center of industry, finance, and military power,—­three degrees of empire, each distinct in itself, but each intertwined with the others, but so intertwined that the word of power, command and influence comes down from the military seat of power through finance and into industry.  Industry does not speak back through the powers of finance to the military center.  The flow of the German dispensation of power or of governmental organization runs downward from the Kaiser.  No power goes up from the people or industry or finance to the war lord at the center.

The Germans know no other system of government.  Outside of Prussia, in the more than thirty states of Germany, there was the local reign.  Now over all is the reign of the Kaiser.  The present generation has seen a united Germany become great among the nations of the earth.  The English-speaking people cannot appreciate the feudalism and the fealty of the German people to their war lord.  They say, “Are not the German people great thinkers; do they not know that the power of government is from the governed?” It is inconceivable to them that the Germans should have a reverse system.

My last word from Germany was with an American lady who has been more than one hundred days nursing the wounded from the battle-line, and she, singular as it may appear, assisted on both sides of that battle-line.  She assisted to dress the wounds of French soldiers where the lacerations of shrapnel had broken one entire side of a human system, face, eye, ear, jaw, arm, leg; yet that soldier lived.  She dressed wounds where more than twenty bullets pierced a single human frame.  Yet that soldier will go back to the front.  French boys in their ’teens had died in her arms at the hospital,—­the hospital where thousands of wounded pass through every month,—­and she had taken back to the parents in Paris the dying message.  She had been in the German and the French trenches on the line of battle.  She had crossed the lines and been under arrest.  She had seen the horrible picture of freight-loads of German corpses on German railroads,—­corpses unhelmeted, with uncovered faces, but in boots and uniform, tied like cordwood in bunches of three and standing upright on their way to the lime-kilns.  She had nursed the wounded German soldier in his delirium, crying in German, which she well understood, over the horrors which still pursued him as he remembered the face of the wife and saw the agony of the children as he stood in line and by direction of his superior officer shot the husband dead.  He moaned in his delirium over the picture.  The faces of the wife and children haunted him, but he cried out that his superior officer had ordered him to do it; and she said, “No, these people are not responsible; the dogs of war have driven them as sheep into the slaughter-pens.  They are beaten, but fight for the Fatherland.  It is their duty and they obey.”