ing some
secondary question, and to believe one's self a somebody when one is
hardly anybody, flatters the universal vanity. All the little
provincial universities of Germany can live in the illusion that they
are full of learned men--thanks to the German conception of what is
learned and serious!

It is a system of regimenting in great barracks of laboratories. It is
the absolute negation of the spirit of initiative of spontaneity and
it is above all the negation of the spirit of protest and revolt.

If the German people had been truly civilized they would never have
maintained silence before the assassination of Belgium. Even among
those whose ideas are contrary to the existing political order in
Germany, none has risen up against this crime admitted and proclaimed
at the beginning of the war in full Parliament by the Chancellor
Bethmann-Hollweg himself. The universal astonishment at such a silence
was so great that even today the world has not recovered from it.
Apart from Liebknecht the whole of German Social Democracy is
dishonored: it is desired to expel the German Socialists from the
International Socialist Movement. They excuse themselves; they
aggravate their fault. They say:

"We should have been arrested and imprisoned." The world replies:

"Are they then afraid of dying?"

In the German Socialist Party everything has been reduced to method
and organized as in the German universities and the German Army.

There were I know not how many Socialist electors; German Socialism
was thought to be already triumphant and invincible. People said:
"They _are_ Germany!"

The German Socialists were held up as an example to all the
democracies of the earth.

Those who swore by the German Socialists affirmed that they would
devour Kaiserism when it should become necessary. But last August in
one hour in the Reichstag it was the German Socialist Party that was
devoured!

When recently certain German Socialists visited the _Maison du Peuple_
of Brussels they expressed astonishment that the Socialists of Belgium
should attach so much importance to the invasion of their country.

"When then binds you to your country?" they asked.

"Honor," was the reply.

"Honor! Honor! that is a very bourgeois ideal," interrupted the
Germans.

Yet a true civilization has as its framework precisely honor. Honor is
not a bourgeois ideal, but an aristocratic ideal. It was slowly
created by the flower of humanity throughout the c