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even in their official minds.[1] By these means the tractableness of the civil executive is secured, an object reached in regard to the subalterns and lower officials by means of the systems giving preference to the claims of former military persons to public posts. Provision is thus made that class justice and the class educational system shall bear their proper military stamp and that self-government[2] shall be kept back with a firm hand. Also worthy of mention is the order that officers, whether in active service or not, must not do any literary work, which, alongside the highly instructive Gädke[3] case, is the most conclusive symptom
- ↑ It should be explained that in Germany it is the ambition of most well-to-do young men to become a lieutenant of the reserve after having served in the army for one year as a volunteer. The title of lieutenant of the reserve is the key to official society. [Translator.]
- ↑ The bold exploit of the "captain of Koepenick," that ingenious cobbler and jail-bird, has exactly in this connection been pointed to as the writing on the wall, and that also by Liberals.
- ↑ Colonel Gädke, when no longer in active service, had criticized the German war minister in the columns of the Berliner Tageblatt, a radical newspaper whose military expert he was at the time. The criticism concerned a speech in the Reichstag in which the minister had defended the duel. Gädke had to appear before a court and lost his military title. He then took the case before the imperial (federal) court and won. [Translator.]
