every conviction, should have its price.  They debase her ideals by decreeing that henceforth the officer is to be the national patron saint to whom the people are to offer up their devotion and worship.  The press, literature, art, lecturing-room—­all preach the same gospel, that the highest product of humanity is the officer, and that “soldierly discipline and smartness”—­in other words, slavish submission, self-conceit, arrogance, and the upholding of mere brute force—­are the noblest qualities of a man and a patriot.  The army is taught to forget that it is the armed population of the country, and is trained to be a band of body servants.  And even when the soldiers return to private life, the idea of servitude is carefully kept up, and he finds again in the military ‘Verein’ the beloved barrack life, with all its servile submissiveness and abnegation of free will.  Whichever way I look, I am filled with horror.  Everything is ground down, everything laid waste, the governing spirit has not left one stone standing upon another.  Even our youth, with whom lies our hope for the future, is rotten in part.  In many student circles I see a want of principle, a low cringing to success, a cowardly worship of animal strength, that is without its parallel in our history.  Instinctively, this corrupt youth sides, in every question, with the strong against the weak, with the pursuer against the pursued, and that at the age when my generation exerted itself passionately, without a question as to right or wrong, for everyone oppressed against every oppressor.  Of course we were simpletons, we of ’48, and the golden youth of to-day scoffs superciliously at our naive ideals.  In the present order of things everything has become a curse—­even the parliamentary system.  For that gives the people no means of making its will known, and has simply become a vehicle for general corruption at the elections.  Our officials, on whose independence of spirit we used to pride ourselves so much, have sunk into mere electioneering agents, and unless they pursue, oppress, and grind the opponents of the government, have no chance of promotion.  It is a Police State such as we have never known, not even before ’48.  For at least every man got his rights in those days, scanty as those rights may have been, and the official was not the enemy of the citizen, but his somewhat despotic guardian and protector.  Shall I say all?  The most consoling class to me in Germany to-day are the Social Democrats.  They have independence of spirit, self-denial, character, and idealism.  Their ideals are not my ideals—­far from it—­but what does that matter?  It is relief enough to find people who have any ideals at all, and who are ready to suffer and die for them.  I fear that not till this generation has passed away will the German people become once more the upright, true-hearted, incorruptible idealists they were, who, at every turning-point of their history, were ready to bleed to death for freedom of opinion, and other purely spiritual advantages.  I take a very black view of things perhaps.  If only the harm done is not permanent, if only Germany retains sufficient virile strength to throw off the poison instilled into her veins and recover her former health!”