"We Germans," writes a correspondent, the Freiherr von Hexenküchen,[1] "are not inferior in intelligence or education to any other race. Had this been so, we could never have reached, in so short a period as four decades, the proud position which we now occupy in science, invention, manufacture, commerce, finance, and administration.[2] { 150} Consequently, if we are well content to live under the institutions we possess, this cannot be put down either to our want of enterprise or to the dulness of our understandings.
"Our people have already shown that they are willing to fight and die for these very institutions which you Englishmen affect to regard with so much contempt. Possibly your people are equally willing to fight and die for theirs. I do not deny this; but it is not yet proved; it remains to be proved.
"I do not assert that your people are inferior to mine in their readiness to fight and die when they are actually faced with a great national danger. But I do claim that mine are superior to yours in the constancy of their devotion to duty. For a hundred years past--not only in periods of stress and danger, which stirred the national imagination, but equally in times of peace and prosperity, which always tend to encourage the growth of comfort and the love of ease--each succeeding generation has been found willing to train itself in the use of arms, so as to be prepared, if occasion should arise, to defend the Fatherland.
"When the present war broke out was there a firmer loyalty or a more patriotic response to the call to arms among your people or among mine? Will your people fight and suffer more gladly for their 'democratic' ideals than mine will for their Kaiser and Fatherland? ... Surely, upon your own principles no comparison should be possible between the warmth of your devotion and the tepidity of ours.
"Is our system really so reactionary and mechanical as you imagine? In an age which has learned { 151} as its special lesson the advantages, in ordinary business affairs of life, of organisation, thoroughness, long views, reticence, and combined effort, guided by a strong central control, is it reaction, or is it progress, to aim at applying the same principles to the greatest, most complex, and infinitely most important of all businesses--that of government itself? Can a nation hope to survive which refuses, in the name of freedom, to submit to control in these respects, if it should be faced by competition with another, which has been wise enough to employ quiet experts instead of loquacious amateurs--any more than a cotton mill could escape bankruptcy were it managed on a system of party government?