in it nothing more than a philosophy doomed to translate into ideas
what was, in its essence, insatiable ambition and will perverted by
pride. The doctrine is an effect rather than a cause; and should the
day come when Germany, conscious of her moral humiliation, shall say,
to excuse herself, that she had trusted herself too much to certain
theories, that an error of judgment is not a crime, it will then be
necessary to remind her that her philosophy was simply a translation
into intellectual terms of her brutality, her appetites, and her
vices. So, too, in most cases, doctrines are the means by which
nations and individuals seek to explain what they are and what they
do. Germany, having finally become a predatory nation, invokes Hegel
as witness; just as a Germany enamoured of moral beauty would have
declared herself faithful to Kant, just as a sentimental Germany would
have found her tutelary genius in Jacobi or Schopenhauer. Had she
leaned in any other direction and been unable to find at home the
philosophy she needed, she would have procured it from abroad. Thus
when she wished to convince herself that predestined races exist, she
took from France, that she might hoist him into celebrity, a writer
whom we have not read--Gobineau.

None the less is it true that perverse ambition, once erected into
theory, feels more at ease in working itself out to the end; a part of
the responsibility will then be thrown upon logic. If the German race
is the elect, it will be the only race which has an unconditional
right to live; the others will be tolerated races, and this toleration
will be precisely what is called "the state of peace." Let war come;
the annihilation of the enemy will be the end Germany has to pursue.
She will not strike at combatants only; she will massacre women,
children, old men; she will pillage and burn; the ideal will be to
destroy towns, villages, the whole population. Such is the conclusion
of the theory. Now we come to its aim and true principle.

As long as war was no more than a means to the settlement of a dispute
between two nations, the conflict was localized to the two armies
involved. More and more of useless violence was eliminated; innocent
populations were kept outside the quarrel. Thus little by little a
code of war was drawn up. From the first, however, the Prussian army,
organized as it was for conquest, did not take kindly to this law. But
from the time when Prussian militarism, now turn