The Fatherland’s heartlessness toward such events as the rape of Belgium becomes less inexplicable when one recalls the cult of brutality which pursues the German from the nursery upward. As a child in swaddling clothes, he is taught that he has no right to a will of his own, and if he attempts to cultivate one, it is promptly beaten out of him. I recall, with more amusement than the episode inspired in me at the time, the struggle we had with our beloved family physician in Berlin, Doctor Keiler, to allow us to bring up our three or four-year-old son as a boy and not as a machine. "_Das Kind darf keinen Willen hoben!_" I remember dear old Keiler shrieking in Wilmersdorf more than once, as he labored in vain to convince us that if Frightfulness was necessary to break the youngster’s inborn initiative and self-reliance, we must not shrink from resorting to it. And when the German escapes the _Kinderstube_ with its unfailing rod and enters _Gymnasium_, he is once more under the cruel lash of Efficiency, which drives scores of lads to suicide at each recurring Easter-time because they have failed in examinations for the higher grade, notwithstanding a term’s unceasing hounding by their drill-sergeant of a teacher and class-room and home cramming which have kept his frame thin and his cheek pallid. A whole literature has come into existence in opposition to the intellectual brutality to which German schoolboys between the ages of eight and sixteen are subjected, but the consensus of opinion is that the system’s advantages outweigh its deficiencies, and that youthful suicides are part of the price the Fatherland must pay for what Professor Lasson of Berlin calls its "cultural superiority" over the rest of mankind.