acity and energy that has resulted in Germany's growing
dependence upon a wooden bureaucracy. Organization is only good as a
means; it is stupefying as an end. Germany has organized herself into
an organization, and is the most over-governed country in the world.
What every democracy of free men wants is not as much, but as little,
organization as possible compatible with economical administration of
industry, the army, the navy, and the affairs of the state. You can
think out a game of chess, but you cannot think out life ahead of the
living of it without cramping it and finally killing it. Life is to
live, not to think, after all. Neither a nation nor an individual has
ever thought out the way to power. This is where the metaphysician
invariably fails when he mistakes thinking for living, when he
mistakes organization, which can never be more than a mould for life,
for life itself. To plan an army is not to produce one, however good
the plan; even to plan a campaign, once you have an army, is to court
disaster unless there is a living man to thrust the plan aside when
the emergencies arise that make up the whole of life, but have nothing
to do with organization.

If all men were tailors, or lawyers, or farmers, or miners, then we
could think out an organization into which they would fit, but
unfortunately for the metaphysician, all men are not categories; all
men are men! In like manner, if all men were cases, then government by
lawyers would be successful, but men and women are neither categories
nor cases. It is purely fantastic, the mere reasoned confusion of the
philosopher, to point to Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel and their successors
as the originators of Germany's progress. If Germany had developed
along those lines, she would be something quite different from what
she is. The Great Elector, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, and Bismarck
made Germany, and her philosophers and pedants are only responsible
for the softness that made it possible. Metaphysicians and lawyers
have their place, but they will inevitably ruin any people whom they
are permitted to govern.

The reader will perhaps look back through these pages to discover a
contradiction. He will seem to find evidence that Germany's position
in the world called for just this present Germany, which is a factory
town with a garden attached, surrounded by an armed camp. I deny the
contradiction. I have tried to analyze and to give the reasons for
Germany's develo