Among the factors which have contributed in recent times to increase this susceptibility of the masses must be counted the political elections, which have everywhere stirred up passions and prejudiced sound judgment. They alone explain many events which have taken place in America. In the several States there are over twenty offices which have to be filled annually by means of public elections. And in these it is not the personal opinion of the voter that counts, but the party politicians and their whips. It is the ingenuity and unscrupulousness of the latter, as well as their expenditure of large sums of money, that decide the issue. It is, in fact, in the great democratic republics that we find the worst form of moral servitude. The widely-diffused but superficial education of the masses renders them peculiarly open to suggestion. The sense of unity of whole nations has been considerably enhanced by the fact that in present-day warfare the entire population is involved either directly or indirectly. The countries as a whole are implicated economically. In 1914 for the first time France opposed to our national army an army organised upon the basis of universal military service; an army, moreover, in which hatred against everything German had been kindled by the assiduous fostering through decades of the agitation for a war of _revanche_. The overwhelming impression of our initial successes, which had by no means been anticipated when Germany was attacked on all sides, inflamed these passions still further. The Swiss writer Stegemann, in his history of this War,[3] suggests that it may have been suspected in foreign countries that the preparedness of Germany's army and navy, which had been achieved during long years by infinite labour and feverish activity, was merely apparent and was associated with a degeneration of nervous force. "To this suspicion the campaigns of this War have furnished a heroic answer. When the order of mobilisation was published, all trace of nervousness vanished. Even from a distance one could perceive the power and energy of a military organisation which was suddenly called from its tranquil development to perform the most exalted achievements. This gave nourishment to the theory that Germany had intentionally provoked the War. The thoroughness in execution which was really due to the character and constitution of the nation was misconstrued as the deliberate provocation of war."