"Not as weak-willed blunderers have we under-taken the fearful risk of this war. We wanted it. Because we had to wish it and could wish it. May the Teuton devil throttle those whiners whose pleas for excuses make us ludicrous in these hours of lofty experience. We do not stand, and shall not place ourselves, before the Court of Europe. Our power shall create new law in Europe. Germany strikes. If it conquers new realms for its genius, the priesthood of all the gods will sing songs of praise to the good war. "We are at the beginning of a war the development and duration of which are incalculable, and in which up to date no foe has been brought to his knees. We wage the war in order to free enslaved peoples, and thereafter to comfort ourselves with the unselfish and useless consciousness of our own righteousness. We wage it from the lofty point of view and with the conviction that Germany, as a result of her achievements and in proportion to them, is justified in asking, and must obtain, wider room on earth for development and for working out the possibilities that are in her." * * * * * ENGLAND'S PERFIDY. _From the Manifesto of Professors Haeckel and Eucken, September, 1914._ "What is happening to-day surpasses every instance from the past; this last example will be permanently characterized in the annals of the world as the _indelible shame of England_. Great Britain is fighting for a Slavic, semi-Asiatic Power _against Teutonism_; she is fighting, not only in the ranks of barbarism but also on the side of _wrong and injustice_, for let it not be forgotten that Russia began the war, because she refused to permit adequate expiation for a miserable assassination; but the blame for extending the limits of the present conflict to the proportions of a world-war, through which the sum of human culture is threatened, rests upon England. "And the reason for all this? Because England was _envious_ of Germany's greatness, because she was bound to hinder further expansion of the German sphere at any cost! There cannot be the least doubt that England was determined from the start to break in upon Germany's great conflict for _national existence_, to cast as many stones as possible in Germany's path, and to block her every effort toward adequate expansion. England lay in wait until the favourable opportunity for inflicting a lasting injury upon Germany should come, and promptly seized upon _the unavoidable German invasion of Belgian territory_ as a pretext for draping her own brutal national egotism in a mantle of decency.