Even schoolmasters and professors have their ambitions; but unless they contribute their quota to the support of imperial ideals, their careers are unlikely to prosper. It is not enough that a lecturer should not run counter to state policy; he must actively promote its ends before he can hope to be transferred to a sphere of greater dignity and influence. Pedagogy is a branch of the Civil Service just as much as the Treasury or the Public Health Department. Teachers from the lowest to the highest grades are the stipendiaries of the bureaucracy. If they render useful services they are promoted. If they fail to render useful services they are passed over. If they indulge in dangerous speculations they are sent adrift. Not merely the army, but the whole German nation, is disciplined, during the period of its impressionable youth, with the object of inclining its mind to support state policy through thick and thin. The schools feed the universities; the universities feed the press, the learned professions, and the higher grades in industry and finance. Private conversation, as well as what is published in newspapers, magazines, and books, bears the impress of the official mint to a degree unthinkable in England or America, Russia or France. Theories of politics are devised by ingenious sophists, exactly as the machinery at Essen is contrived by engineers--for the express purpose of forwarding Prussian policy. History is twisted and distorted in order to prepare the way for imperial ambitions by justifying them in advance. It is a signal triumph for the thoroughness of German methods that all the thinkers, dreamers, {129} poets, and prophets, with but a few exceptions, should have been commandeered and set to work thinking, dreaming, poetising, and prophesying to the glory of the Kaiser, and his army, and his navy, and his counsellors, and his world policy, and the conquests and expansion which are entailed therein. [Sidenote: MOBILISATION OF INTELLECTUALS]