“Let us suppose that, through ill-luck, the war ends in a German success. Good-bye, then, to your dreams, to European idealism, to democratic dogmas. Great will be the discomfiture of your Tugendbund. The days of the Holy Alliance will return. When peace comes under these conditions your ‘borns,’ on their manorial estates, will luxuriate in the pious certitude that they are essentially different from the ‘not-borns,’ and that God has predestined them to be masters and leaders of men, just as, in the beginning, He created the white elephant and the royal tiger. Then, perhaps, in our defeat, we shall regretfully recall Sembat’s formula, _Faites un roi, sinon faites la paix_; then we shall hail Maurras as a prophet; inspired with a sense of renewed virtue, we shall mock at the civic dream which was our chief glory; and we shall fill the world, again become feudal, with the clamour of our repentance. A fine spectacle indeed would be such a repudiation by France of the great vision of fraternal justice with which she intoxicated the nations. What will you do in those days, you German democrats, when the mother of all democracy is vanquished, when the only disinterested champion of your ideal has perished at your hands? “But you may rest easy in your minds, for we have no intention of dying. We have agreed to three years’ military service. We should agree, if needs must, to four years or to five. And do not, for this reason, accuse us of militarism. Our militarism is the militarism of Valmy. Full well do you know that we have no hidden thoughts of aggression or oppression. When we consented to the increase of our army, it was doubtless with a sincere desire to witness the overthrow of the barbarism of the kaisers and the crown princes, but we have never ceased to be faithful to the revolutionary watchword: ‘Let us vote for war upon the tyrants and for peace with the peoples!’” * * * * * The socialist of Munich, Wichert, the president of the _Freistudenten_, Moritz von Bethmann—how far away does it all seem now. They have killed; we have killed. Their glances full of youth and intelligence, which, when I was a free traveller, I received frankly, face to face, man to man; our conversations; our blossoming friendship; our common hope; the ideal, dear to Nietzsche, of the “good European”—what fragile things you are, beautiful creations of the mind!