matter of the relation of the individual to
the supreme governing power, we have always held, and still believe,
that Germany is sadly reactionary. For half a century your professors,
in the employ of an educational system controlled by a bureaucratic
Government, have taught what we condemn as a false philosophy of
government. Your histories, your books on philosophy, your whole
literature, glorify the _State_; and you have accepted the dangerous
doctrine that the individual exists to serve the State, forgetting that
the State is not the mystical, divine thing you picture it, but a
government carried on by human beings like yourselves, most of them
reasonably upright, but some incompetent and others deliberately bad,
just like any other human government. We believe that the only excuse
for the existence of the State is to serve the individual, to create
conditions which will insure the greatest liberty and highest possible
development to the individual citizen. It has never seemed to us
creditable to the German intellect that it could be satisfied with a
theory of government outgrown by most other civilised nations. That you
should confuse efficiency with freedom has always seemed to us a tragic
mistake, and never so tragic as now, when a small coterie of human
beings, subject to the same mistakes and sins as other human beings, can
hurl you into a terrible war before you know what has happened, clap on
a rigid censorship to keep out any news they do not want you to learn,
then publish a white book which pretends to explain the causes of the
war, but omits documents of the most vital importance, thereby causing
the people of a confiding nation to drench the earth with their
life-blood in the fond illusion that the war was forced upon them, and
that they are fighting for a noble cause. Most pitiful is the sad
comment of an intelligent German woman in a letter recently received in
this country: "We, of course, only see such things as the Government
thinks best. We were told that this war was purely a defensive one,
forced upon us. I begin to believe this may not be true, but hope for a
favourable ending."

Certainly in what you wrote to me you were thoroughly sincere and
honest; yet your letter was full of untrue statements because you were
dependent for your information upon a Government-controlled press which
has misled you for military and political reasons. How can a nation know
the truth, think clearly, and act righ