To this there is only need to add one point, that this perverted refinement of thought, this sophism, grows and is developed among a nation which is brutal and barbarous among all others, so that the inclinations of flesh and blood are in it ready to respond to the suggestions of a corrupt philosophy. In Germany the sophist unchains the beast: the man of letters lets slip the barbarian, or, as was forcibly said by Hugo, an old admirer of Germany, when he had become enlightened by the sinister glare of the events of 1870, _the pedant is the ally of the trooper_. The fusion of these two elements, the intimate union of German thought and of its military counterpart, welding together the whole of the classes intermediate between them: in a word, that is to say, the whole of Germany—all this must not be forgotten in any just appraisement of the foregoing events. So we see that in fact all Germany approves the actions of which we have just told the story, and the German intellectuals have taken the course of identifying themselves with them in their well-known but shameful “appeal to the civilised world.” CONCLUSION The _theoretic responsibility_ for German cruelties, therefore, falls upon the military writers of Germany directly; but fundamentally, and probing more deeply, upon her professors, historians, and philosophers. Then come the heads of the army, who were the first to carry out these teachings. But the _verdict of mankind_ condemns the whole of Germany; for all her citizens, from the highest to lowest, appear in the eyes of the world, which was at first amazed and then indignant, as identifying themselves with the work of devastation, murder, pillage, and cowardice by which, in the judgment of history, the war that Germany launched upon the world will be noted. We, at least, who are neutral of nationality and impartial in judgment, lump them all together, in the feeling of contempt and of disgust which they have roused in our indignant breast, and in the stern but just judgment which our reason, bitterly disappointed as it has been, has meted out to them. THE END PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED, BRUNSWICK ST., STAMFORD ST., S.E., AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of German Barbarism, by Léon Maccas