he serfs upon his estate.
It was, and is, their openly expressed theory that they were in their
position by the grace of God, that they owed no reckoning to any man,
and that kingdom and folk were committed for better or worse to their
charge. Round this theory of the Dark Ages there gathered all the forces
of the many courts of the empire, all the nobility who make so huge a
class in Germanic countries, all the vast army to whom strict discipline
and obedience were the breath of life, all the office-holders of the
State, all the purveyors of warlike stores. These and their like were
the natural setting to such a central idea. Court influence largely
controlled the teaching at school and universities, and so the growing
twig could be bent. But all these forces together could not have upheld
so dangerous and unnatural a theory had it not been for the influence of
a servile press. How that press was managed, how the thoughts of the
people could be turned to the right or the left with the same precision
as a platoon of grenadiers, has been shown clearly enough in the memoirs
of Bismarck. Public opinion was poisoned at its very roots. The average
citizen lived in a false atmosphere where everything was distorted to
his vision. He saw his Kaiser, not as an essentially weak and impetuous
man with a dangerous entourage who were ever at his ear, but as Germany
personified, an angel with a flaming sword, beating back envious
assailants from the beloved Fatherland. He saw his neighbors not as
peaceful nations who had no possible desire to attack him, but on the
contrary lived in constant fear of him, but as a band, of envious and
truculent conspirators who could only be kept in order by the sudden
stamp of the jackboot and the menacing clatter of the sabre. He
insensibly imbibed the Nietzsche doctrine that the immorality of the
Superman may be as colossal as his strength and that the slave-evangel
of Christianity was superseded by a sterner law. Thus, when he saw acts
which his reason must have told him were indefensible he was still
narcotized by this conception of some new standard of right. He saw his
Kaiser at the time of a petty humiliation to Great Britain sending a
telegram of congratulation to the man who had inflicted this rebuff.
Could that be approved by reason? At a time when all Europe was
shuddering over the Armenian massacres he saw this same Kaiser paying a
complimentary visit to the Sultan whose hands were still we