Do not let us here discuss the excitement which people naturally feel under such circumstances, nor the emotions of wild enthusiasm and patriotic hatred into which the rush of events leads them. If these emotions lead to excesses, we can neither wonder nor complain at it. Excess is in the nature of things and is part and parcel of a system in which material forces work for a just end—namely, the safety of the country. The general upheaval which accompanied a declaration of war cannot fail to rouse the masses and to lead to extravagant and blustering demonstrations. Nevertheless, even in that respect, there are limits which a nation will never exceed, unless it is being exploited in the interests of the gospel of frightfulness, unless the love of destruction for its own sake is the aim of its leaders and its preceptors, and is the basis of the nation’s conception of war. That is the case with the Germans. The instincts of blind violence which men carry naturally within them and which education alone restrains, had been so carefully fostered by the Clausewitz and Schellendorf schools in the mind of the German people that, once the restraint of peace has been removed, we could postulate in them the symptoms of the most dangerous impulses: symptoms which, in the eyes of every impartial judge, appeared like the dismal omens of an appalling thirst for blood. The correspondent of the _Hovedstaden_ (_La Capitale_), a Danish journal, tells that he heard some women at Berlin uttering impassioned speeches, shouting that an attempt was being made to annihilate Germany, and urging the men to the task of destruction by fire and sword in the foreign countries to which they were going. This same correspondent records the fact that “men and women speakers followed one another in the Café Piccadilly belching out curses against Great Britain and her allies.” Such were the feelings of the public in Germany, different, one might say, from what one would naturally expect to find in such a case, for, is it human for a woman to urge on her husband, her father or her son to a work of cruel destruction? How effective must have been the doctrines disseminated by German authors like those we have quoted, if they have been able, as they have been, to destroy absolutely the finer feelings even of women, and if the thirst for violence has led women to make public attempts to incite their men-folk? THE STATE OF MIND OF GERMAN INTELLECTUALS But let us leave the military writers, and speak of men whose peaceful profession ought to have the effect of inspiring in them feelings of moderation. The classes whom we call the intellectuals have been the most savage of all.