received philosophic justification in a series of thinkers, culminating
in Hegel, who regarded the individual as a capricious egotist, the
state, incarnate in its sovereign, as the supreme spiritual entity. He
justified war, regarding it as a permanent necessity, and practically
made might, right, in arguing that a conquering nation is justified by
its more fruitful idea in annexing the weaker, while the conquered, in
being conquered, is judged of God. Here is the philosophic
justification of that Prussian arrogance which in Nietzsche is carried
into glittering rhetoric. Thus the Prussian state from afar back was
opposed to the general spirit of old Germany.

Since 1870, it must be admitted, that spirit is gone. With the
formation of the Prussian empire and for the half century of its
existence, every force of social control--press, church, state,
education, social opinion--was deliberately employed to stamp on the
German people one idea--the subordination of the individual to the
state, as the supreme and only virtue. How far has the policy succeeded?
Apparently absolutely. To the outside observer the old spirit seems
utterly gone. How far this policy has been helped by the cultivation of
the fear of the Slav, one cannot say. Looking at the map of Europe, one
sees that the geographical relation of Germany to the great Slavic
empire is not unlike the relation of Holland to Germany. Thus the
deliberate fostering of fear of the vast empire of the East has done
much to strengthen the hands of the Prussian regime in its chosen task.

Nevertheless, when one recalls the spiritual heritage of Germany: when
one thinks of Herder, Schiller and Goethe; Tauler, Luther and
Schleiermacher; Froebel, Herbart and Richter; Kant, Fichte and Novalis;
Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner; one feels that something of the old German
heritage must survive. When the German people find out what has happened