ggle is directed
against "German culture." If such culture teaches that the rights of men
include contempt of treaties, contempt of private property, contempt of
the lives of non-combatants, you cannot be surprised that the other
nations show no desire to preserve it for your benefit and their
detriment.

It is not by arms but by arguments and facts that economists like us,
faithful to the teachings of the physiocrats and of Adam Smith, have
sought to protect ourselves against it. On the eve of the war, at the
inauguration of Turgot's Monument, we set forth his ideas of liberty and
humanity in opposition to the German realpolitik. We hope that the
present events will cure those among our professors whom it had
contaminated, and that they will cease to constitute themselves
accomplices of that, form of Pan-Germanism which they introduced to
public opinion and to our legislation. The acts of your diplomatists and
of your Generals, and the approbation given them by you and other
representatives of German science, are a terrible demonstration, but
conclusive, of the dangers and vanity of German culture. You are its
true destroyers.

*Militarism and Civilization.*

"Without our miltarism," say you, "our civilization would have been
annihilated long ago." And you invoke the inheritance of Goethe,
Beethoven, Kant. But Goethe, born in the free city of Frankfort, lived
at the Court of Charles Augustus, which was a liberal and artistic
centre ever threatened by Prussia. But Beethoven was of Flemish origin,
and lived in Holland until the age of twenty-four, spending the rest of
his life in Vienna, and he has nothing in common with Prussian
militarism, so redoubtable for Austria. But Kant, if he was born and
lived at Koenisberg, the true capital of the Prussian Kingdom, welcomed
the French Revolution, and when he died in 1804 it was not Prussian
militarism which had recommended his writings to the world.

But the solidarity which you establish between German militarism and
German culture, of which you and your colleagues claim to be the
representatives, is a proof of the confusion of German conceptions.

To present Goethe, Beethoven, and Kant to the world you surround them
with bayonets. In the same manner every tradesman and every merchant
throughout Germany has got into the habit of saying: "I have four
million bayonets behind me!" Your Emperor said to some tradesmen who
complained of bad business: "I must travel!" And he