A large part of the proletariat of to-day will certainly not be daunted by the prospect, but will regard it as a distinct improvement on their present situation. That is the terrible fact, a fact for which we are responsible and for which we must atone, with what ruin to German culture remains to be seen. Who, in this Age of Mechanism, who on the side of the bourgeoisie, who of our statesmen, our professors, our captains of industry, above all who of our clergy, has pitied the lot of the working-man? The statesmen, for peace' sake, worked out the Insurance Laws; the professors, with their emphatic dislike to the world of finance and their unemphasized devotion to the monopoly of their own stipends, preached a doctrinaire socialism; the clergy lauded the divinely-appointed principle of subordination; the great industrialists, wallowing in their own greed for power, money, favour, titles and connexions, scolded the workers for wanting anything. The silent subjugation of our brothers was assured through the laws of inheritance, our leaders put the socialistic legislation in fetters, freedom of combination was thwarted, electoral reform in Prussia was scornfully denied, demands for better conditions of living, conditions which to-day we think ridiculously low, were suppressed by force. And all the time, the cost of a single year of war, a tiny fraction of the war-reparations, would have sufficed to banish want for ever from the land. At last the millions of the defenceless and disappointed were driven into that war of the dynasties and the bourgeois, which was unloosed by the folly of years, the dazzlement of weeks, the helplessness of hours. If the state of things I have foreseen is hell, then we have earned hell. And it ill becomes us to wrap ourselves in the superiority of our culture, to rebuke the masses for their want of intellect, their want of character, their greed, and to keep insisting on the unchangeability of human character, on the virtues of rulership and leadership, on the spiritual unselfishness and intellectual priesthood of the classes born to freedom. Where was this heaven-nurtured priestly virtue sleeping when Wrong straddled the land and the great crime was wrought? It was composing feeble anthologies and pompous theories, cooking its culture-soup, confusing, with true professorial want of instinct, 1913 with 1813[15]--and putting itself at the disposition of the Press Bureau. _That_ was the hour in which to fight for the supremacy of the spirit. Now romance comes, as it always does, too late.