he enters a vocational life, under the stern leadership
of his superiors. He becomes, our critics continue, simply a
disagreeable pedantic tool of the all-powerful "drill." This atmosphere
of "drill," or in other words this stern hard military spirit, envelops
him, accompanies him as guardian from the cradle to the grave, and makes
of him an unbearable companion for all the more refined, gentle, and
amiable nations. Yes, our opponents often declare that they are waging
war not only against Germany, but against this pedantic, military,
tyrannical sense of duty, which they call the "Prussian spirit." It
shall once and for all, they assert, be eradicated from the world.

*A Religious Feeling of Duty.*

Far be it from me to deny that my country people, male and female, do
indeed possess an unusually strong sense of duty. This is combined with
a desire for justice which is so often looked upon by outsiders as a
lack of patriotic pride, and with an honesty which easily makes the
German appear so clumsy and awkward. These three characteristics belong
indissolubly together and one is not to be thought of without the other.
The spirit from which the German sense of duty arises is what the
foreigner so often misunderstands in us. He generally confuses sense of
duty with blind obedience. But this sense of duty does not originate
from a need for submission or from a mental dependence. No, it rests on
a deep philosophical reason and arises from the mental recognition of
ethical and national necessity. That is why it can exist side by side
with the most extreme individualism, which also belongs to the
peculiarities of the character of our people. The Germans have always
been a nation of thinkers. Not only the scholar, also the simple worker,
the laborer, the modest mother take a deep pleasure in forming their
philosophy of life and the world. Side by side with the loud triumph of
our industry goes this quieter existence, which has been rather pushed
into the background in the last decades, but has not, therefore, ceased
to exist. And the further the belief in miracles stepped into the
background, the more the belief in duty acquired a warm religious tinge.
The loud complaints about the vanishing of the sense of duty among the
young, which has so often been voiced by public opinion, only prove how
strongly this ethical force was governing people's minds. Every seeming
diminution of it was felt to be a disastrous endangerment of the