Such, in briefest outline, is the story of the academic “garrison.” Of the lesser lansquenets, the horde of privat-dozents and obscurer professors, whose intellectual folly is only equaled by their audacity, and who are the mainstay of the Pan-German movement, I have said nothing. It may be doubted whether the second generation can show anything like the intellectual prestige which, with all their intemperance, distinguished their predecessors. But they have all laid to heart Treitschke’s maxim, “Be governmental,” honor the King, worship the State, and “believe that no salvation is possible except by the annihilation of the smaller States.” It is a strange ending to the Germany of Kant and Goethe.
Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben Der täglich sie erobern muss--
The noble lines of Goethe have now a variant reading--“He alone achieves freedom and existence who seeks to repeat his conquests at the expense of others” might be the motto of the Germans of to-day. But as they have appealed to History, so will History answer them.
In a pamphlet of mordant irony addressed to “Messieurs les Ministres du culte évangélique de l’armée du roi de Prusse” in the dark days of 1870, Fustel de Coulanges warned these evangelical camp-followers of the consequences to German civilization of their doctrines of a Holy War. “Your error is not a crime but it makes you commit one, for it leads you to preach war which is the greatest of all crimes.” It was not impossible, he added, that that very war might be the beginning of the decadence of Germany, even as it would inaugurate the revival of France. History has proved him a true prophet, but it has required more than a generation to show with what subtlety the moral poison of such teaching has penetrated into German life and character. The great apostle of that teaching was Treitschke who, though not indeed a theologian, was characteristically fond of praying in aid the vocabulary of theology. “Every intelligent theologian understands perfectly well,” he wrote, “that the Biblical saying ‘Thou shalt not kill’ ought no more to be interpreted literally than the apostolic injunction to give one’s goods to the poor.” He called in the Old Testament to redress the balance of the New. “The doctrines of the apple of discord and of original sin are the great facts which the pages of History everywhere reveal.”