ours harmed nobody then, and only serves to
show what a number of intellectual serfs must have been members of
that particular House of Representatives.

We have not overcome this habit of slapdash comparative criticism, for
only the other day a distinguished American inventor left Berlin with
these words as his final message: "We have nothing to learn from
Germany." But in the nineteenth century, where does the American of
sober intelligence, if Lincoln be omitted, find a match for Bismarck
as a statesman, Heine as a wit and song-writer, Wagner, Brahms, and
Beethoven as musicians, Goethe as a man of letters and poet, the still
living influence of Lessing and Winckelmann as critics, Fichte as a
scholarly patriot, Hegel and Kant as philosophers, von Humboldt,
Liebig, Helmholtz, Bunsen, and Haeckel as scientists, Moltke and Roon
as soldiers, Ranke and Mommsen as historians, Auerbach, Spielhagen,
Sudermann, Freytag, "Fritz" Reuter, and Hauptmann as novelists and
dramatists, Krupp and Borsig as manufacturers, and the Rothschilds as
bankers? Lincoln, Lee, Sherman, Jackson, and Grant may equal these men
in their own departments, but aside from them our only superiority, and
a very questionable superiority it is, lies in our trust-and-tariff-
incubated millionaires. Let us try to see straight, if only that we may
learn and profit by the superiority of others.

These explanations that I have given, historical, political, external,
and internal, offer reasons worth pondering both why we do not
understand Germany's huge armament and why Germany looks upon it as a
necessity.

However much the expenditure on fleet and army may be disguised, the
burden is colossal. In the year 1878 the net expenditure, ordinary and
extraordinary, for purposes of defence, for army and navy and all
other military purposes whatsoever including pensions, amounted to
452,000,000 marks; in 1888, to 660,000,000 marks; in 1898, to
882,000,000 marks; and in 1908, to 1,481,000,000 marks.

The total expenses, net, of the empire in 1908 were 1,735,000,000
marks, showing that only 254,000,000 marks out of the grand total of
1,735,000,000 were spent for other than military purposes. As the army
and navy now stand at a peace strength of some 700,000 men, and as
these men are all in the prime of their working power, the loss in
wages and in productive work may be put very conservatively at
600,000,000 marks, which brings the cost of the support of the
military