It cannot be too clearly stated, it is the most important fact in the history of the last half century, that the German people was methodically indoctrinated with the idea of a German world-predominance based on might, and with the theory that war was a necessary thing in life. The key to German historical teaching is to be found in Count Moltke's dictum: "Perpetual peace is a dream, and it is not even a beautiful dream. War is an element in the order of the world ordained by God." (Gladstone, we have noted, in his Tory days showed the same pious acquiescence in the family slave-holding.) "Without war the world would stagnate and lose itself in materialism." And the anti-Christian German philosopher, Nietzsche, found himself quite at one with the pious field-marshal. "It is mere illusion and pretty sentiment," he observes, "to expect much (even anything at all) from mankind if it forgets how to make war. As yet no means are known which call so much into action as a great war that rough energy born of the camp, that deep impersonality born of hatred, that conscience born of murder and cold-bloodedness, that fervour born of effort in the annihilation of the enemy, that proud indifference to loss, to one's own existence, to that of one's fellows, that earthquake-like soul-shaking which a people needs when it is losing its vitality."[1]
This sort of teaching, which pervaded the German Empire from end to end, was bound to be noted abroad, bound to alarm every other power and people in the world, bound to provoke an anti-German confederation; and it was accompanied by a parade of military, and presently of naval preparation, that threatened France, Russia, and Britain alike. It affected the thoughts, the manners, and morals of the entire German people—for they are a plastic people, and not refractory under instruction like the Irish and English. After 1871, the German abroad thrust out his chest and raised his voice. He threw a sort of trampling quality even into the operations of commerce. His machinery came on the markets of the world, his shipping took the seas with a splash of patriotic challenge. His very merits he used as a means of offence. (And probably most other peoples, if they had had the same expe-
- ↑ These quotations are from Sir Thomas Barclay's article "Peace" in The Encyclopædia Britannica.
