The Assault: Germany Before the Outbreak and England in War-TimeWile, Frederic William
History
The Assault: Germany Before the Outbreak and England in War-Time
Wile, Frederic William
World War, 1914-1918
I have enumerated only the outstanding figures of the German War Party.
They could be supplemented at will--there are the men like Professor von
Schmoller, of the University of Berlin, who foresees the day when "a
nation of two hundred million Germans oversea would rise in Southern
Brazil"; or Professor Adolf Lasson, also of Berlin, who proclaimed the
doctrine that Germans’ "cultural paramountcy over all other nations"
entitles them to hegemony over the earth; or Professor Adolf Wagner, the
Berlin economist, who excoriates compulsory arbitration as the refuge of
the politically impotent and a dogma beneath the dignity of the Germany
of the Hohenzollerns; or the whole dynasty of politician-professors like
Delbrück, Zorn, Liszt, Edward and Kuno Meyer, Eucken, Haeckel, Harnack,
or minor theorists like Münsterberg, who year in and year out preached
the doctrine of Teutonic superiority, Teutonic invincibility and
Teutonic "world destiny." These intellectual auxiliaries of the War
Party in their day have sent tens of thousands of young men out of
German universities with politically polluted minds. Their class-rooms
have been the real breeding ground and recruiting camps of the German
War Party.
And then, of course, in addition to the admirals who wanted war, and the
professors who glorified war, and the editors, pamphleteers, Navy and
Army League leaders and paid agitators who wrote and talked war, there
was the German Army, represented by its corps of fifty thousand or sixty
thousand officers, which was the living, ineradicable incarnation of war
and with every breath it drew sighed impatiently for its coming. I
suppose armies in all countries more or less constitute "war parties."
But never in our time has an army tingled and spoiled for battle as
sleeplessly as the legions of the Kaiser. It was written in the stars
that it was only a question of time when they would realize their
aspiration to prove that the German war machine of the day was not only
the peer, but incomparably the superior, of the Juggernauts with the aid
of which Frederick the Great and Moltke remapped Europe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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