e teaching which once the old German Empire
received with "astonishment and indignation" from Frederick the Great,
that "the rights of States can only be asserted by the living power";
that what was won in war can only be kept by war; and that we Germans,
cramped as we are by political and geographical conditions, require the
greatest efforts to hold and to increase what we have won. We regard our
warlike preparations as an almost insupportable burden, which it is the
special duty of the German Reichstag to lighten so far as possible. We
seem to have forgotten that the conscious increase of our armament is
not an inevitable evil, but the most necessary precondition of our
national health, and the only guarantee of our international prestige.
We are accustomed to regard war as a curse, and refuse to recognize it
as the greatest factor in the furtherance of culture and power.

Besides this clamorous need of peace, and in spite of its continued
justification, other movements, wishes, and efforts, inarticulate and
often unconscious, live in the depths of the soul of the German people.
The agelong dream of the German nation was realized in the political
union of the greater part of the German races and in the founding of the
German Empire. Since then there lives in the hearts of all (I would not
exclude even the supporters of the anti-national party) a proud
consciousness of strength, of regained national unity, and of increased
political power. This consciousness is supported by the fixed
determination never to abandon these acquisitions. The conviction is
universal that every attack upon these conquests will rouse the whole
nation with enthusiastic unanimity to arms. We all wish, indeed, to be
able to maintain our present position in the world without a conflict,
and we live in the belief that the power of our State will steadily
increase without our needing to fight for it. We do not at the bottom of
our hearts shrink from such a conflict, but we look towards it with a
certain calm confidence, and are inwardly resolved never to let
ourselves be degraded to an inferior position without striking a blow.
Every appeal to force finds a loud response in the hearts of all. Not
merely in the North, where a proud, efficient, hard-working race with
glorious traditions has grown up under the laurel-crowned banner of
Prussia, does this feeling thrive as an unconscious basis of all
thought, sentiment, and volition, in the depth of the