“Das Gesetz is der Freund des Schwachen,
Moechte gern die Welt verflachen
Aber der Krieg laesst die Kraft erscheinen.”
In this criminal glorification of violence, Thomas Mann himself has been surpassed. Ostwald preached the victory of Kultur, if necessary by Force: Mann proved that Kultur is Force. Someone was needed to cast aside the last veil of reserve and say “Force alone. All else be silent.” We have read extracts from the cynical article in which Maximilian Harden, treating the desperate efforts of his government to excuse the violation of Belgian neutrality as feeble lies, dared to write “Why on earth all this fuss? Might creates our Right. Did a powerful man ever submit himself to the crazy pretentions or to the judgment of a band of weaklings.”
What a testimony to the madness into which German intelligence has been precipitated by pride and struggle, and to the moral anarchy of this Empire, whose organisation is imposing only to the eyes of them who do not see further than the façade! Who cannot see the weakness of a government which gags its socialist press and yet tolerates such an insulting contradiction as this? Who does not see that such words defame Germany before the whole world for centuries to come. These miserable intellectuals imagine that with their display of infuriated Nietzscheism and Bismarckism they are acting heroically and impressing the world. They merely disgust it. They wish to be believed. People are only too ready to believe them. The whole of Germany will be made responsible for the delirium of a few writers. Germany will one day realise she has had no more deadly enemy than her own intellectuals.
I write here without prejudice, for I am certainly not proud of our French intellectuals. The Idol of Race, or of Civilisation, or of Latinity, which they so greatly abuse, does not satisfy me, I do not like any Idol—not even that of Humanity. But at any rate those to which my country bows down are less dangerous. They are not aggressive, and, moreover, there remains even in the most fanatical of our intellectuals a basis of native common sense, of which the Germans of whom I have just spoken seem to have lost all trace. But it must be admitted that on neither side have they brought honour to the cause of reason, which they have not been able to protect against the winds of violence and folly. There is a saying of Emerson’s which is applicable to their failure: “Nothing is more rare in any man than an act of his own.” Their acts and their writings have come to them from others,
