minion or Downfall"; or "The Beautiful Blonde Beast"—these are the high-flowing terms rushing in a deep, rich, abundant stream through innumerable volumes—a stream as wide, as deep, as rich as the blood of hundreds of thousands of human beings that this infernal gospel has brought to cruel and untimely death.
Again, I say, it is a gospel as insane as it is wicked. It is a conflict with nature; it is the crude idea, which it would be calumnious to Paganism to call Pagan, that man consists of body alone. Man's soul still remains unconquerable. Scatter into bleeding fragments millions of his bodies with your howitzers, Man's soul rises from the million corpses, in its everlasting youth, in its indestructible immortality. These spiritual forces, which your gospel of war ignores, are no more capable of being destroyed than a great river or the incarnardine sea. And of these spiritual forces there is none more indestructible than the principle of race and of nationality. Watch this mighty stream; for tens of thousands of years it has flowed on. Ten thousand summers have dried it up to a trickling stream; ten thousand winters have imprisoned it in the bonds of ice. But it still flows on, and will flow on, till it reaches the sea, to the very end of time. And so it is with the principle of race and of nationality. Bloody battlefields, scaffolds, gaols, have tried to dry or to freeze its course; but it goes on until it also reaches the sea, which to it is freedom.
Apply this Prussian gospel of militarism to the law's within the State, and again it is as insane as it is wicked. Smooth, suave, unctuous again it is in language; but look at it as it works out in the concrete. It is again might against right. As to Germany herself, even to her own people it is a gospel which has lost the intellectual support of all that is really intellectual and really good in the nation. If you were to produce what has been said of this gospel in the organs of advanced German thought, you would find the indictment to be far more crushing than anything I could express. For what is the Government of Germany to-day? It can be summed up in a few words. The country and all its destinies he in the hands ultimately of a few men; and these men, in their turn, are held in bondage by one of the most selfish classes that ever ruled and ruined a nation. The Prussian Junker—is there any type more detestable or more disastrous or more sinister in the history of nations? He takes from
