their armies. Then against this exhausted nation, at peace with them, German soldiers made war. You wonder at this. Remember that you are dealing with a new spirit and a new force. Listen to the great prophet Nietzsche in "Zarathustra":

"Ye shall love peace as a means to new wars, and the short peace better than the long. I do not advise you to work, but to fight. I do not advise you to compromise and make peace, but to conquer. Let your labor be fighting and your peace victory. You say that a good cause hallows even war. I tell you that a good war hallows every cause.'

This peace at Brest-Litovsk was no historical accident; it was an excellent, an ideal, a German peace. It fulfilled all conditions. A good peace should begin a war not end one, and this veritable triumph of modern German philosophy and statecraft, this Walhalla peace, ended before it ever began. But it may be objected that Nietzsche was a philosopher, a rhapsodist mumbling in his dreams, that what he said was only suggestion and read exclusively by university professors. The parents and children of Germany do not sympathize with such doc

trine. Let us turn the pages of the Prussian Book of Life and read what is written and, so far as we know, approved by many mothers and their sons. Jung Deutschland is the official organ of Young Germany. It announces in an issue of October, 1913:

"War is the noblest and holiest expression of human activity. For us, too, the glad, great hour of battle will strike. Still and deep in the German heart must live the joy of battle and the longing for it. Let us ridicule to the utmost the old women in breeches who fear war and deplore it as cruel and revolting. No; war is beautiful. Its august sublimity elevates the human heart beyond the earthly and the common. In the cloud palace above sit the heroes, Frederick the Great and Blücher and all the men of action-the Great Emperor, Moltke, Roon, Bismarck—are there as well, but not the old women who would take away our joy in war. When here on earth a battle is won by German arms and the faithful dead ascend to heaven, a Potsdam lance-corporal will call the guard to the door and 'Old Fritz' (Frederick the Great), springing from his golden throne, will give the command to present arms. That is the heaven of Young Germany."*

*The Pan-German citations in this chapter whose source is not otherwise indicated will for the most part be found in Conquest and Kultur, by Professors Notestein and Stoll, by whom they were controlled. (Committee on Public Information.)

"Such," our Committee on Public Information informs us, "are the doctrines taught to young boys of about the age of our Boy Scouts."

Grasping at straws in the flood we have said to ourselves, but in the Social Democrats there is health and hope for a future of peace. With them we can argue. They will understand us. What of Harden, who sometimes has criticised his government and sometimes has praised President Wilson, and whose great Socialist paper has occasionally been suppressed? Germany has been preparing for war for many years. She had come near precipitating one at the time of the Morocco dispute of 1911.

When war did not result, he, the Social Democrat and Jew, wrote with the same sense of aggrievance, of wounded national pride that marked the Evangelical Church Journal, which concluded its article with the words: "From one end of Germany to the other people voice but one question: 'When do we get our marching orders?"" Harden was merely more eloquent.

"We might say that the hostile arrogance of the western powers releases us from all our treaty obligations, throws open the doors of our

verbal prison-house, and forces the German Empire, resolutely defending her vital rights, to revive the ancient Prussian policy of conquest.

"All Morocco in the hands of Germany; German cannon on the routes to Egypt and India; German troops on the Algerian frontier; this would be a goal worthy of great sacrifices.

"When we can put 5,000,000 German soldiers into the field we shall be able to dictate to France the conditions upon which she may preserve the empire of northern Africa-'New France' with her brown Algerian troops. We have entered upon a struggle in which the stake is the power and future of the German Empire."

In spite of his protests in late July, this political weathercock was better pleased in 1914, when in December war was actually under way, and he could write in exultation:

"Cease the pitiful attempts to excuse Germany's action. No longer wail to strangers, who do not care to hear you, telling them how dear to us were the smiles of peace we had smeared like rouge upon our lips, and how deeply we regret in our hearts that the treachery of conspirators dragged us unwillingly into a forced war. That national something you must conceal from foreign eyes. . . . Not as

weak-willed blunderers have we undertaken the fearful risk of this war. We wanted it. Because we had to wish it and could wish it. May the Teuton devil throttle those whiners whose pleas for excuses make us ludicrous in these hours of lofty experience. We do not stand, and shall not place ourselves, before the court of Europe. Germany strikes. If it conquers new realms for its genius, the priesthood of all the gods will sing songs of praise to the good war. We are waging this war not in order to punish those who have sinned, nor in order to free enslaved peoples, and thereafter to comfort ourselves with the unselfish and useless consciousness of our own righteousness. We wage it from the lofty point of view and with the conviction that Germany, as a result of her achievements and in proportion to them, is justified in asking and must obtain wider room on earth for development and for working out the possibilities that are in her."

Liebknecht, too, was swept off his feet, and in the beginning was for war, as he himself told Ambassador Gerard. Sword-rattling in Germany, therefore, is not confined to the heretochs. The thousands of German people who read, "If I Were the Kaiser," thought William II was doing pretty well, only that he was too hesitant, too lacking in the courage of