The time was, not long ago, when Germany was deemed the school-master of the world. German efficiency and German obedience to authority were seen to be the products of German teachers and German schools. In methods of teaching and in school organization, as well as in ideals of scholarship, the world sought to follow Germany. If here and there one objected that German education seemed to sacrifice the individual to the system and to beget an obedience too implicit, we felt that it was only because the Germans are such docile, pious, family folk, and we rather chided ourselves for our rougher ways and for that self-will that made us unholily thankful that we had been born in a freer land. But now the character of German education stands revealed. We are no longer as hopeful as we once were of the possible success of an appeal to the German people over the heads of their military masters. They seem on the whole to like the kind of government they have, and to want to be exploited by Prussia. They are perilously near to what Mr. H. G. Wells has given as his definition of damnation--satisfaction with existing things when existing things are bad. They are experiencing what Mr. Edmond Holmes has called the Nemesis of docility. And it is their system of education that has brought about this result. If the German people are damned to satisfaction with irresponsible autocracy and fatuous docility, their schools have damned them. For a century, German education has been at work to breed the present world-menace. The German schools have made the German people what they are. They have sought to develop habits of mind rather than free intelligence; they have valued efficiency in a given task above initiative and power to think for oneself. They have set children in vocational grooves and molded them to pattern. They have educated the few to exert authority, and have trained the many to obey. They have nurtured the young upon hatred of other peoples; and, much as the Jews of old awaited the Messiah, they have lived and labored in expectation of "The Day." They have exalted Vaterland into a religion, and have degraded God into a German tutelary deity. The German schools have welded the German people into a compact, efficient, military machine. The desires of the State are their desires; the Kaiser's will is their will.