CHAPTER XV.
THE GERMAN POSITION An Aggressive Germany--The Logic of It--The War Party Supreme--A War for Business--What Confronts Germany--Her Finish.
A mighty nation surrounded and besieged, yet still fighting on foreign soil, is the position of Germany to-day.

Her triumph would mean, not alone a European conquest, but a world-conquest.

Her defeat within a reasonable time does not mean her destruction or dismemberment.

It means only the destruction of Prussian militarism and that theory of national existence into which the German people have been led under the present emperor, that theory which teaches:-- "War and courage have done more great things than Charity." "What is good?
All that increases the feeling of power; the will to power." "The weak and debauched must perish, and should be helped to perish." This is the philosophy, the teaching and the language of Nietzsche and on it Treitschke and Bernhardi founded their war propaganda.
When Emperor William II ascended the throne and became the "All Highest War Lord," he found himself at the head of two great Germanys: a military Germany arising from the Prussian conquest of France in 1870, by which more than thirty states had been welded into a compact unity of military order, commercial tariffs, railroad transportation, and national finance; and an industrial Germany forging ahead in the commercialism of the earth at a pace exceeded by no other nation.
Bismarck and Von Moltke had made a Germany for defense.

The railways did not flow to the ocean for the interchange of commerce.