m a secondary school is necessary. Some authorities maintain
that the only way to prevent being flooded with candidates is to
make the examinations crushingly severe. Children are early made
to realise that all hope of succeeding in life rests upon the
passing of these examinations. Thus the despair which often leads
to suicide on the one hand and knowledge without keenness on the
other.
Hardly any class has suffered more heavily in the war than the
masters of the State schools, which are equivalent to English
Council schools and American public schools. The thinning of
their ranks is an eloquent proof of the heaviness of the German
death toll. Their places have been taken by elderly men, but
principally by women. It is a kind of Nemesis that they should
have fallen in the very cause they have been propagating for at
least a generation.
Those who knew only the old and pleasant Germany do not realise the
speeding up of the hate machine that has taken place in the last
decade. The protests against this State creation of hate grow less
and less as the war proceeds. To-day only comparatively few
members of the Social-Democrat Party raise objection to this
horrible contamination of the minds of the coming generation of
German men and women. Not much reflection is needed to see on what
fruitful soil the great National Liberal Party, with its backing of
capitalists, greedy merchants, chemists, bankers, ship and mine
owners, is planting its seeds for the future. There is no cure for
this evil state of affairs, but the practical proof, inflicted by
big cannon, that the world will not tolerate a nation of which the
very children are trained to hate the rest of the world, and taught
that German _Kultur_ must be spread by bloodshed and terror.
With the change in Germany has come a change in the family life.
The good influence of some churches has gone completely. They are
part of the great war machine. The position of the mother is not
what it was. The old German Hausfrau of the three K's, which I
will roughly translate by "Kids, Kitchen, and Kirk," has become
even more a servant of the master of the house than she was. The
State has taken control of the souls of her children, and she has
not even that authority that she had twenty years ago. The father
has become even more important than of yore. The natural tendency
of a nation of which almost every man is a soldier, is to elevate
the man at the expense o
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