In addition to the two emperors, there are two marshals, four generals, six princes and nobles, five colonels, sixteen commandants and majors, thirteen other subaltern officers, written on the picture of horror, which we have sketched, and of which they and the whole of the German people are the individual and responsible authors. Is “German militarism” alone responsible? We say _the German people_, for it would be a mistake not to recognise as the authors of these crimes merely the army which performed them, the officers who tolerated them, approved them or ordered them—in a word, only the German military element known as “militarism.” For this militarism is in very truth the offspring of the whole nation, as well as of causes which have nothing military about them—to wit, the teaching in the universities, which has been shaping it for a hundred years. The cult of force which to the German is the cult of brutal force imposed without mercy, goes down to the very roots of his thought. This must not be confounded with the spirit of violence to which, at all ages of the world, barbarian conquerors have given way. This cult proceeds from the fact that Germany considers herself the only nation worthy of the name, as _the_ people _par excellence_ upon whom, by law of nature, devolves the management of the modern world, around which it is the historic and philosophic duty of Europe to rally until absorbed in it, and until the civilised world is only one vast Germany in fact. When the German declares that force is superior to right, he does not mean force in itself, any force whatever, but his own force, which is right. Such are the notions taught by the members of the German cabinet, by its professors, by the universities of Berlin, Munich, Halle, and Bonn for one hundred years. Such is the teaching promulgated in Fichte’s famous “Addresses to the German Nation,” uttered in 1808. We shall easily understand that a nation which incarnates in itself all law, all history, all the future, all rational truth, all philosophic influence, hardly needs to think of the means by which it puts itself forward. From the relative point of view of human interest, as from the impartial point of view of eternal ideas, one thing alone matters and that is that Germany should triumph, and that Germanism should grow.