Is it not intelligible that our enemies declare that they will not rest until a system is destroyed which constitutes a permanent threatening of our neighbors? Must they not otherwise fear that in a few years they will again have to take up arms, and again see their provinces overrun and their towns and villages destroyed? Were these people not right who prophesied that the spirit of Treitschke and Bernhardi dominated the German people--the spirit which glorifies war as an aim in itself and does not abhor it as an evil; that among us it is still the feudal knights and Junkers and the caste of warriors who rule and who fix our ideals and our values--not the civilian gentleman; that the love of dueling, which inspires our youth at the universities, lives on in those who guide the fortunes of the people? Had not the events at Zabern and the Parliamentary debates on that case shown foreign countries how civil rights and freedoms are valued among us, when questions of military power are on the other side? Cramb, a historian who has since died, an admirer of Germany, put the German point of view into the words of Euphorion: Träumt Ihr den Friedenstag? Träume, wer träumen mag! Krieg ist das Losungswort! Sieg, und so klingt es fort. Militarism, really a school for the nation and an instrument of policy, makes policy into the instrument of military power, if the patriarchal absolutism of a soldier-kingdom renders possible an attitude which would not be permitted by a democracy which had disengaged itself from military-junker influences. That is what our enemies think, and that is what they are bound to think, when they see that, in spite of capitalistic industrialization, and in spite of socialistic organization, the living, as Friedrich Nietzsche says, are still governed by the dead. The principal war aim of our enemies, the democratization of Germany, will be achieved. JEOPARDIZING THE FUTURE Today, after two years of the war, there can be no further doubt that we cannot hope for an unconditional victory over Russians, English, French, Italians, Rumanians, and Americans, and that we cannot reckon upon the overthrow of our enemies. But we can reach a compromised peace only upon the basis of the evacuation of the occupied territories, the possession of which in any case signifies for us a burden and weakness and the peril of new wars. Consequently, everything should be avoided which hinders a change of course on the part of those enemy groups which might perhaps still be won over to the idea of compromise--the British Radicals and the Russian Reactionaries. Even from this point of view our Polish project is just as objectionable as any interference with Belgian rights, or the execution of British citizens--to say nothing of the mad submarine war scheme.