"Every great crime against culture for the last four centuries lies on their [the German] conscience.... It was the Germans who caused Europe to lose the fruits, the whole meaning of her last period of greatness--the period of the Renaissance...."--_Ecce Homo_, p. 124. "The future of German culture rests with the sons of Prussian officers."--_The Genealogy of Morals_, p. 222. "If any one wishes to see the 'German soul' demonstrated _ad oculos_, let him only look at German taste, at German arts and manners: what boorish indifference to 'taste'!"--_The Antichrist_. [9] "What quagmires and mendacity there must be about if it is possible, in the modern European hotchpotch, to raise questions of race." A Nation--"Men who speak one language and read the same newspapers."--_The Genealogy of Morals_, p. 226. [10] "A boldly daring, splendidly overbearing, high-flying, and aloft-up-dragging class of higher men, who had first to teach their century--and it is the century of the _masses_--the conception 'higher man.'"--_Beyond Good and Evil_, p. 219. "This man of the future, this tocsin of noon and of the great verdict, which renders the will again free, who gives back to the world its goal and to man his hope, this Antichrist and Antinihilist, this conqueror of God and of Nothingness--_he must one day come_."--_The Genealogy of Morals_, p. 117. [11] "The blonde beast that lies at the core of all aristocratic races."--_The Genealogy of Morals_, p. 42. "The profound, icy mistrust which the German provokes, as soon as he arrives at power,--even at the present time,--is always still an aftermath of that inextinguishable horror with which for whole centuries Europe has regarded the wrath of the blonde Teuton beast."--_Ibid._ [12] Friedrich von Bernhardi: born 1849 at St. Petersburg, where his father Theodor von Bernhardi was a Councillor of the Prussian Legation; entered a Hussar regiment in 1869; military attaché at Berne in 1881; in 1897 he was chief of the General Staff of the 16th Army Corps; in 1908 he was appointed commander of the 7th Army Corps; retired in the following year. He was a distinguished cavalry general, and is probably the most influential German writer on current politico-military problems. [13] Probably not less so upon British policy and inaction. As water is the result of blending oxygen and hydrogen in certain proportions, so is the present war the resultant of German militarism and British anti-militarism in combination. [14] "Every State has as sovereign the undoubted right to declare war when it chooses, consequently every State is in the position of being able to cancel any treaties which have been concluded."--Treitschke, _Selections_, p. 15. "It is not only the right, but the moral and political duty of the statesman to bring about a war."--Bernhardi, _Germany and the Next War_, p. 41