eated and self-renewing order,
and who at the same time rejects the old, is simply working for the
dominion of force and chance. A society can no more remain permanently
without order than the staff of a factory or the crew of a ship. Only
instead of an organic order we may have an accidental and arbitrary,
an order of the personal type, springing from the dexterity shown in
some favourable moment, maintaining itself by force, and seeking to
perpetuate itself in some form of hereditary oligarchy.

An order of the priestly and hierarchical type is no longer thinkable
to-day, nor can one of the peasant type come into question in a land
of urban industry. Whoever wishes to see an organic self-determining
and self-regenerating order of society, has therefore to choose
between the military order, resting upon disciplined bodily capacity,
or the mercantile and capitalist order which rests upon business-sense
and egoistic alertness, or the demagogic order which rests upon the
rhetorical domination of the masses, and does not last long as it soon
turns to violence and oligarchy, or finally the order of culture,
resting upon spirit, character, and education.

This last is not merely the only suitable one for us and the only one
which is worthy of our past; it will also in time become the general
order of society prevailing over all the world. In the vision of this
order we recognize the mission that Prussia neglected, though it lay
within its grasp for a hundred years; what it neglected and the rock
on which it foundered.

The greatness of Prussian policy since 1713 lay in its premonition and
appreciation of the principle of mechanism even before it became
common to all the world. Organization and improvement, the war machine
and money, science, practicality and conscientiousness--all this is
clearly mechanization seen from the political side.

The early application of these principles was a stroke of genius far
in advance of the then condition of the world. Seen from this
standpoint, all the rest of the continental world, not yet mechanized,
and burdened with the relics of mediaevalism, Caesarism and clericalism,
seemed torpid and lost in illusions: arbitrary, inaccurate and
slovenly. With short interruptions this Prusso-central point of view
was maintained until the middle of the World-War; and not quite
unjustly, for Prussia remained in every respect ahead of other powers
in the department of mechanization.

For a hundr