me at all the keynote of German civilization."

Teutonic Superexcitation.

"It is impossible that such pride, such a sense of arrogant national
superiority as that which marks Germany, should maintain among a
democratic people; it is possible only to a very aristocratic country.
What has happened is its logical outgrowth in the country which it has
infected.

"In Germany this sense of national pride, of intolerance of others, even
of contempt for others, has been developed until it amounts to
superexcitation. It not only affects Germany's relations to other
peoples, but it affects the relations of Germans to one another.

"Different classes of the German population continually exhibit it in
their dealings with one another.

"It is continually illustrated in those events which have been the
wonder of visiting foreigners--episodes of the contemptuous
ill-treatment of subordinate German soldiers by their superiors. It goes
beyond that, manifesting itself in the treatment of all civilians by the
lowest soldier, and, further still, in the attitude even of the lowest
civilian to all foreigners, even the highest.

"The German individual may not consider himself superior to all
individuals of other nationalities, but he will be sure to consider his
nation so far superior to every other that there can be no comparison
between it and them. His is a peculiar arrogance. It is not at all
personal; it is purely national; but none the less it is arrogance, and
all arrogance is dangerous.

"A hierarchy always exists in aristocratic countries; the hierarchical
idea has been developed further in Germany than elsewhere.

"This has given Germany an unfortunate impulse. If to this impulse we
add that other born of all her various victories since 1866, especially
those which were won while Germany was realizing Bismarck's dream of
triumph 'through fire and blood'--her industrial victories, her
scientific advance, her social progress--and consider the Germanic
tendency toward egotism, we do not find ourselves surprised when we
find, examine, and appraise exactly what we have today in Germany.

"The perversion of national sentiment into national arrogance has been
the definite, although, perhaps, unrealized and unintended, aim of every
educational influence which has been at work in Germany since 1870. It
has amounted to an unparalleled perversion of a nation's sentiment
toward all the outside world.

"This war marks the crisis o