Yet they, too, had their ideals.

I remember in 1871, the year after the Franco-German War, meeting a party of Germans who were unveiling a tablet by the Pasterze Glacier in memory of a comrade fallen in the war--Karl Hoffman, a pioneer of mountaineering in the Glockner district--and hearing their impassioned speeches.

The mountains of Austrian Tyrol were to them "die Alpen seines Vaterlandes," and the song with the refrain, "Lieb Vaterland muss groesser sein" echoed from the rocks, "My beloved Fatherland must be greater"; may not this be the expression of a noble patriotism?
But it so easily turns to "my country must have more, must take more," and becomes the very watchword of greed.

"Deutschland ueber Alles" might perhaps mean first to the German "My country before everything to me." _Corruptio optimi pessima_, it easily becomes "Germany over all,"-- the country which dominates an inferior world and is thus the condensed motto of supreme insolence.
"Insolence breeds the tyrant," and the doom the ancient poet prophesies is the divine ordinance to be fulfilled by the action of man.
"Insolence, swollen with vain thought, mounts to the highest place, and is hurled down to the doom decreed." Insolence seems the nearest equivalent for the Greek word [Greek: hybris], which implies much more.

Some translate it "pride." It is a sense of superiority, greater strength, higher culture, leading to a claim to dominate the minds and the lives, the destinies, of others, and then in its arrogant self-assertion to override all laws and all restraints imposed by justice.