when once the sum is made up no further effort can
change it. What are our lives or our labors, our fortunes or even our
families, when compared with the life or death of the great mother of us
all? We are but the leaves of the tree. What matter if we flutter down
today or tomorrow, so long as the great trunk stands and the burrowing
roots are firm. Happy the man who can die with the thought that in this
greatest crisis of all he has served his country to the uttermost, but
who would bear the thoughts of him who lives on with the memory that he
had shirked his duty and failed his country at the moment of her need?

There is a settled and assured future if we win. There is darkness and
trouble if we lose. But if we take a broader sweep and trace the
meanings of this contest as they affect others than ourselves, then ever
greater, more glorious are the issues for which we fight. For the whole
world stands at a turning point of its history, and one or other of two
opposite principles, the rule of the soldier or the rule of the citizen,
must now prevail. In this sense we fight for the masses of the German
people, as some day they will understand, to free them from that
formidable military caste which has used and abused them, spending their
bodies in an unjust war and poisoning their minds by every device which
could inflame them against those who wish nothing save to live at peace
with them. We fight for the strong, deep Germany of old, the Germany of
music and of philosophy, against this monstrous modern aberration the
Germany of blood and of iron, the Germany from which, instead of the old
things of beauty, there come to us only the rant of scolding professors
with their final reckonings, their Weltpolitik, and their Godless
theories of the Superman who stands above morality and to whom all
humanity shall be subservient. Instead of the world-inspiring phrases of
a Goethe or a Schiller, what are the words in the last decade which have
been quoted across the sea? Are they not always the ever-recurring words
of wrath from one ill-balanced man? "Strike them with the mailed fist."
"Leave such a name behind you as Attila and his Huns." "Turn your
weapons even upon your own flesh and blood at my command." These are the
messages which have come from this perversion of a nation's soul.

*A Mighty Despotism.*

But the matter lies deep. The Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs have used
their peoples as a great landowner might use t