_The German Lesson_

The barbarian must be met on his own ground of force and efficiency,--"an
eye for an eye," not with arguments or apologies, not even with numbers
or wealth. The vital question for us all to-day is not how unprepared the
Allies were for the onslaught of barbarism, but how far they have overcome
their handicap, how thoroughly they have learned the barbarian's lesson.
The varying degrees in which the different allied nations have grasped
the meaning of the lesson and applied it tell us not merely their chance
of survival, but also the probable outcome of the world decision. What
that lesson is which Germany is teaching the world by blood and iron is
a byword on men's tongues to-day: the value of it is another question.

* * * * *

Long before the war, Germany had published far and wide her scorn
of her enemies. The Russians were an undisciplined barbarian horde;
the English, stupid idlers who spent on their sport the energy that
the industrious German devoted to preparing himself for world rule.
As for the French, they were an amiable and amusing people, but
degenerate--fickle, feeble, rotten with disease. Germany's hate
was reserved for the English, her most ignoble slurs for the French.
Needless to say, Germany has not found any one of her many enemies as
wholly despicable as she had imagined them to be. Her miscalculations
were greatest with France. That the French people are smaller in
stature than the German, that they eat less and breed less, that by
temperament they are cheerful and gay and witty convinced the dull
German mind that the race had become degenerate and trivial,--negligible.
This habit of contemptuously attributing to other peoples vileness and
degeneracy because their social ideals differ from her own is part of