The objects of Prussia’s ambition--an ambition shared by every anæmic, bespectacled clerk and able-bodied tram-conductor in the Fatherland--are “cultural,” and the means of achieving them are heavy guns, quick-firers, and millions of ruthless warriors. Real German culture in all its manifestations--scientific, artistic, philosophical, musical, commercial, and military--accepts and champions the new principle and the fresh ideas which are to regenerate the effete social organisms of to-day. According to the theory underlying this grandiose national enterprise, the forces of Christianity are spent. New ichor for the dry veins of decrepit Europe is stored up in German philosophy and poetry. Mediæval art has exhausted the traditional forms, but Teutonism is ready to furnish it with new ones. Music is almost a creation of German genius. Commerce was stagnating in the ruts of old-world use and wont until German enterprise created new markets for it, and infused a new spirit into its trading community. Applied science owes more to German research and ingenuity than to the efforts of all the world besides. And the race thus highly gifted is deserving of a field worthy of its world-regenerating labours. At present it is cooped up in Central Europe with an absurdly small coast-line. Its surplus population has, for lack of colonies, to be dumped down on foreign shores, where it is lost for ever to the Fatherland. For this degrading position, which can no longer be tolerated, there is but one remedy: expansion. But to be effectual it must be expansion combined with Germanization. And the only means of accomplishing this end is for Germany to hack her way through the decrepit ethnic masses that obstruct her path and to impose her higher civilization on the natives. Poland was the first vile body on which this experiment was tried, and it has been found, and authoritatively announced, that the Slavs are but ethnic manure, useful to fertilize the seed-fields of Teutonic culture, but good for little else. The Latin races, too, are degenerates who live on memories and thrive on tolerance. Beef-eating Britons are the incarnation of base hypocrisy and crass self-indulgence, and their Empire, like a hollow tree, still stands only because no storm has yet assailed it. To set youthful, healthy, idealistic Germany in the high places now occupied by those inert masses that once were progressive nations is but to adjust obsolete conditions to the pressing requirements of the present time--to execute the wise decrees of a just God. And in order to bring this task to a satisfactory issue, militarism must reign as the paramount power before culture can ascend the throne. Militarism is a necessity, and unreasoning obedience the condition of its success.