In order to achieve this, it would be advisable that these institutions should be established in university towns, so that the services of the professors who would there be available might be turned to account. This world economic War has revealed the necessity that officers should make themselves so far familiar with political, constitutional, economic, and social questions as to enable them to form an independent judgment about these subjects. The character of the whole modern life of our State makes it desirable that the officer should keep himself in touch with these questions, though he need not for that reason become a politician. Frederick the Great, even in his day, wrote: "I expect above all that a general shall be an honest man and a good citizen of the State; without these qualities, all his ability and all his skill in war will be rather harmful than profitable."[21] By this the King implies that military science and political science are closely related. We must contrive to kindle in the officer, while he is still young, an interest in this relation, so that he may be capable, in the training of his men, of enlightening them from time to time upon questions of civic and economic life. Short, well-written primers might be of great value here. That "untiring application" which King Frederick demanded from his officers and which has also always been demanded of us, must be insisted on more than ever after the War. Its intellectual side is by no means the least important. The training of the mind by assiduous study is a necessity not only for the officers of the General Staff, but also for those who wish to occupy with advantage any high position in the army. We have no use for officers with a scholastic training, but we do need officers with well-trained minds. Napoleon felt keenly the lack of such, and, even at St. Helena, he placed the Austrian General Staff above his own.[22] As long as theory does not set itself--to use the words of Clausewitz--"in opposition to intelligence," it can only be useful, for it is then no longer theory in the vulgar sense. Even the talent of the most famous representatives of the military art--Frederick the Great, Napoleon, and Moltke--had a theoretical foundation, but this foundation consisted only in education of the mind, which had been developed and enlarged as a result of their own experience of life and of war. In any case, the important thing can never be the encouragement of purely theoretical knowledge in the army, but rather the transforming of knowledge into practice. Willisen[23] has said justly: "It is always a long step from knowledge to ability to act, but none the less it is a step from knowledge and not from ignorance." [1] _Bemerkungen über den Einfluss der verbesserten Feuerwaffen_. [2] _On War_, i., 187. [_Vom Kriege, III. B._, 6 Kap.] [3] Reisner v. Lichtenstern. _Die Macht der Vorstellung im Kriege_. Berlin, 1902. [4] _Echo de Paris_, November 23, 1915.