As inborn and cultivated habits of frugality and thrift enabled the introduction of the bread-ticket without marked disturbance to normal German life, so the nation resorted willingly and easily to all the other new conditions which war imposed. A people goose-stepped and policed from the nursery to the grave, bred in docility, with wills of their own eternally broken before they have left the _Kinderstube_, with initiative and self-reliance knocked out of them with the rod at home and in school, and with blind unyielding subordination to discipline literally pounded into their bones in barracks, provides no astonishing spectacle in making war, when war comes, as one man obeying one supreme will. War is the _ultima ratio_, indeed, which this national system of self-suppression has in mind. The surprising thing is not that the world has witnessed so colossal an exhibition of team-work in Germany. The unexpected would have been if Germany had given any other account of herself. When we speak, as we all do, and especially the English, of "Germany’s years of preparation," we should eliminate the notion that these preparations were confined to shells, guns, fortifications, battleships and legions. No single other "preparation" of the German war gods measured up, in my judgment, to the unseen and unnoticed, yet all-engulfing, decade-old, national scheme of molding the minds of men, women, children and babes along the line of unresisting, complete slavery to Superiority, uniformed as the State. When you dilute this super-subjugation with the wine of true patriotism which, despite their Socialism, their police, their burdensome taxes, their goose-step, their powerless parliaments and all the other concomitants of an autocratic monarchy, flows red and joyously through the soul of the Germans, you secure a spiritual admixture which approaches invincibility. You discover the ingredients of what Lloyd-George christened the "potato-bread spirit," which he truly described as a greater danger for Germany’s enemies than Hindenburg’s strategy. The former will survive long after the latter has broken down.