Is it not intelligible that our enemies declare that they will not rest
until a system is destroyed which constitutes a permanent threatening of
our neighbors? Must they not otherwise fear that in a few years they
will again have to take up arms, and again see their provinces overrun
and their towns and villages destroyed? Were these people not right who
prophesied that the spirit of Treitschke and Bernhardi dominated the
German people--the spirit which glorifies war as an aim in itself and
does not abhor it as an evil; that among us it is still the feudal
knights and Junkers and the caste of warriors who rule and who fix our
ideals and our values--not the civilian gentleman; that the love of
dueling, which inspires our youth at the universities, lives on in those
who guide the fortunes of the people? Had not the events at Zabern and
the Parliamentary debates on that case shown foreign countries how civil
rights and freedoms are valued among us, when questions of military
power are on the other side?
Cramb, a historian who has since died, an admirer of Germany, put the
German point of view into the words of Euphorion:
Träumt Ihr den Friedenstag?
Träume, wer träumen mag!
Krieg ist das Losungswort!
Sieg, und so klingt es fort.
Militarism, really a school for the nation and an instrument of policy,
makes policy into the instrument of military power, if the patriarchal
absolutism of a soldier-kingdom renders possible an attitude which would
not be permitted by a democracy which had disengaged itself from
military-junker influences.
That is what our enemies think, and that is what they are bound to
think, when they see that, in spite of capitalistic industrialization,
and in spite of socialistic organization, the living, as Friedrich
Nietzsche says, are still governed by the dead. The principal war aim of
our enemies, the democratization of Germany, will be achieved.