The twentieth century educated German is, however, by no means given
over completely to material and physical aggrandizement and the worship
of might. He cherishes a partly new conception of the State as a
collective entity whose function is to develop and multiply, not the
free, healthy, and happy individual man and woman, but higher and more
effective types of humanity, made superior by a strenuous discipline
which takes much account of the strong and ambitious, and little of the
weak or meek. He rejects the ethics of the Beatitudes as unsound, but
accepts the religion of valor, which exalts strength, courage,
endurance, and the ready sacrifice by the individual of liberty,
happiness, and life itself for Germany's honor and greatness. A nation
of 60,000,000 holding these philosophical and religious views, and
proposing to act on them in winning by force the empire of the world,
threatens civilization with more formidable irruptions of a destroying
host than any that history has recorded. The rush of the German Army
into Belgium, France, and Russia and its consequences to those lands
have taught the rest of Europe to dread German domination, and--it is to
be hoped--to make it impossible.
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