the militarist interests by keeping alive the spirit
of national jealousy and international hatred, out of which wars arise
and without which warlike enterprise might hopefully be expected to
disappear out of the scheme of human intercourse. The punishment would
fall, as all economic burdens and disabilities must always fall, on the
common man, the underlying population.

The chief relation of this common run, this underlying population of
German subjects, to the inception and pursuit of this Imperial warlike
enterprise, is comprised in the fact that they are an underlying
population of subjects, held in usufruct by the Imperial establishment
and employed at will. It is true, they have lent themselves unreservedly
to the uses for which the dynasty has use for them, and they have
entered enthusiastically into the warlike adventure set afoot by the
dynastic statesmen; but that they have done so is their misfortune
rather than their fault. By use and wont and indoctrination they have
for long been unremittingly, and helplessly, disciplined into a spirit
of dynastic loyalty, national animosity and servile abnegation; until it
would be nothing better than a pathetic inversion of all the equities of
the case to visit the transgressions of their masters upon the common
run; whose fault lies, after all, in their being an underlying
population of subjects, who have not had a chance to reach that
spiritual level on which they could properly be held accountable for the
uses to which they are turned. It is true, men are ordinarily punished
for their misfortunes; but the warlike enterprise of the Imperial
dynasty has already brought what might fairly be rated as a good measure
of punishment on this underlying populace, whose chief fault and chief
misfortune lies in an habitual servile abnegation of those traits of
initiative and discretion in man that constitute him an agent
susceptible of responsibility or retribution.

It would be all the more of a pathetic mockery to visit the
transgressions of their masters on these victims of circumstance and
dynastic mendacity, since the conventionalities of international equity
will scarcely permit the high responsible parties in the case to be
chastised with any penalty harsher than a well-mannered figure of
speech. To serve as a deterrent, the penalty must strike the point where
vests the discretion; but servile use and wont is still too well intact
in these premises to let any penalty tou