That blessing has cost us dear, fearfully dear, dearer than the friends of humanity had hoped; for, proud as we may be of our victories and our victors, let us not deceive ourselves in this, that there is in the history of humanity nothing so inhuman, nothing that makes us so entirely despair of the genius of mankind, nothing that bows us so low to the very dust, as war--unless even war becomes ennobled and sanctified, as it was with us, by the sense of duty, duty towards our country, duty towards our town, duty towards our home, towards our fathers and mothers, our wives and children. Thus, and thus only, can even war become the highest and brightest of sacrifices; thus, and thus only, may we look history straight in the face, and ask, “Who would have acted differently?” I do not speak here of politics in the ordinary sense of the word,--nay, I gladly leave the groping for the petty causes of the late war to the scrutiny of those foreign statesmen who have eyes only for the infinitesimally small, but cannot, or will not, see the powerful handiwork of Divine justice that reveals itself in the history of nations as in the lives of individuals. I speak of politics in their true and original meaning, as a branch of ethics, as Kant has proved them to be, and from this point of view, politics become a duty from which no one may shrink, be he young or old. Every nation must have a conscience, like every individual; a nation must be able to give to itself an account of the moral justification of a war in which it is to sacrifice everything that is most dear to man. And that is the greatest blessing of the late war, that every German, however deep he may delve in his heart, can say without a qualm or a quiver, “The German people did not wish for war, nor for conquest. We wanted peace and freedom in our internal development. Another nation or rather its rulers, claimed the right to draw for us lines of the Main, if not new frontiers of the Rhine; they wished to prevent the accomplishment of that German union for which our fathers had worked and suffered. The German nation would gladly have waited longer still, if thereby war could have been averted. We knew that the union of Germany was inevitable, and the inevitable is in no hurry. But when the gauntlet was thrown in our face, and, be it remembered, with the acclamation of the whole French nation, then we knew what, under Napoleonic sway, we might expect from our powerful neighbor, and the whole German people rose as one man for defense, not for defiance. The object of our war was peace, and a lasting peace, and therefore now, after peace has been won, after our often menaced, often violated, western frontier has been made secure forever by bastions, such as nature only can build, it becomes our duty to prove to the world that we Germans are the same after as before the war, that military glory has nothing intoxicating to us, that we want peace with all the world.”