it was a little different from what it usually was; but it was quite enough that the people knew it.

Thus, what may possibly have been the best intention became ridiculous, if not actually irritating.

Stories about the monarch’s proverbial frugality, his much too early rising and his slaving away until late into the night, amid the permanent peril of threatening undernourishment, aroused very dubious comments. People did not ask to know what food and how much of it the monarch deigned to consume; they did not begrudge him a ‘square’ meal; nor were they out to deprive him of the sleep he needed; they were satisfied if in other things, as a man and character, he was an honor to the name of his house and to the nation, and if he fulfilled his duties as a ruler. Telling fairy tales helped little, but did all the more harm.

This and many similar things were mere trifles, however. What had a worse effect on sections of the nation, that were unfortunately very large, was the mounting conviction that people were ruled from the top no matter what happened, and that, therefore, the individual had no need to bother about anything. As long as the government was really good, or at least had the best intentions, this was bearable. But woe betide if the old government whose intentions were after all good were replaced by a new one which was not so decent; then spineless compliance and childlike faith were the gravest calamity that could be conceived of.

But along with these and many other weaknesses, there were unquestionable assets.

For one thing, the stability of the entire state leadership, brought about by the monarchic form of state and the removal of the highest state posts from the welter of speculation by ambitious politicians. Furthermore, the dignity of the institution as such and the authority which this alone created: likewise the raising of the civil service and particularly the army above the level of party obligations. One more advantage was the personal embodiment of the state’s summit in the monarch as a person, and the example of responsibility which is bound to be stronger in a monarch than in the accidental rabble of a parliamentary majority­the proverbial incorruptibility of the German administration could primarily be attributed to this. Finally, the cultural value of the monarchy for the German people was high and could very well compensate for other drawbacks. The German court cities were still the refuge of an artistic state of mind, which is increasingly threatening to die out in our materialistic times. What the German princes did for art and science, particularly in the nineteenth century, was exemplary. The present period in any case cannot be compared with it.

As the greatest credit factor, however, in this period of incipient and slowly spreading decomposition of our nation, we must note the army. It was the mightiest school of the German nation, and not for nothing was the hatred of all our enemies directed against this buttress of national freedom and independence. No more glorious monument can be dedicated to this unique institution than a statement of the truth that it was slandered, hated, combated, and also feared by all inferior peoples. The fact that the rage of the international exploiters of our people in Versailles was directed primarily against the old German army permits us to recognize it as the bastion of our national freedom against the power of the stock exchange. Without this warning power, the intentions of Versailles would long since have been carried out against our people. What the German people owes to the army can be briefly summed up in a single word, to wit: everything.

The army trained men for unconditional responsibility at a time when this quality had grown rare and evasion of it was becoming more and more the order of the day, starting with the model prototype of all irresponsibility, the parliament; it trained men in personal courage in an age when cowardice threatened to become a raging disease and the spirit of sacrifice, the willingness to give oneself for the general welfare, was looked on almost as stupidity, and the only man regarded as intelligent was the one who best knew how to indulge and advance his own ego. it was the school that still taught the individual German not to seek the salvation of the nation in lying phrases about an international brotherhood between Negroes, Germans, Chinese, French, etc., but in the force and solidarity of our own nation.

The army trained men in resolution while elsewhere in life indecision and doubt were beginning to determine the actions of men. In an age when everywhere the know­it­alls were setting the tone, it meant something to uphold the principle that some command is always better than none. In this sole principle there was still an unspoiled robust health which would long since have disappeared from the rest of our life if the army and its training had not provided a continuous renewal of this primal force. We need only see the terrible indecision of the Reich’s present leaders, who can summon up the energy for no action unless it is the forced signing of a new decree for plundering the people; in this case, to be sure, they reject all responsibility and with the agility of a court stenographer sign everything that anyone may see fit to put before them. In this case the decision is easy to take; for it is dictated.

The army trained men in idealism and devotion to the fatherland and its greatness while everywhere else greed and materialism had spread abroad. It educated a single people in contrast to the division into classes and in this perhaps its sole mistake was the institution of voluntary one­year enlistment. A mistake, because through it the principle of unconditional equality was broken, and­the man with higher education was removed from the setting of his general environment, while precisely the exact opposite would have been advantageous. In view of the great unworldliness of our upper classes and their constantly mounting estrangement from their own people, the army could have exerted a particularly beneficial effect if in its own ranks, at least, it had avoided any segregation of the so­called intelligentsia. That this was not done was a mistake; but what institution in this world makes no mistakes? In this one, at any rate, the good was so predominant that the few weaknesses lay far beneath the average degree of human imperfection.

It must be attributed to the army of the old Reich as its highest merit that at a time when heads were generally counted by majorities, it placed heads above the majority. Confronted with ­the Jewish­democratic idea of a blind­worship of numbers, the army sustained belief in personality. And thus it trained what the new epoch most urgently needed: men. In the morass of a universally spreading softening and effeminization, each year three hundred and fifty thousand vigorous young men sprang from the ranks of the army, men who in their two years’ training had lost the softness of youth and achieved bodies hard as steel. The young man who practiced obedience during this time couldthen learn to command. By his very step you could recognize the soldier who had done his service.

This was­­the highest school of the German nation, and it was not for nothing that the bitterest hatred of those who from envy and­greed needed and desired the impotence of the Reich and the defenselessness of its citizens was concentrated on it What many Germans in their blindness or ill will did not want to see was recognized­by the foreign world: the German army was the mightiest weapon serving the freedom of the German nation and the sustenance of its children.

The third in the league, along with the state form and the army, was the incomparable civil service of the old Reich.

Germany was the best organized and best administered country in the world. The German government official might well be accused of bureaucratic red tape, but in the other countries things were no better in this respect; they were worse. But what the other countries did not possess was the wonderful solidity of this apparatus and the incorruptible honesty of its members. It was better to be a little old­fashioned, but honest and loyal, than enlightened and modern, but of inferior character and, as is often seen today, ignorant and incompetent. For if today people like to pretend that the German administration of the pre­War period, though bureaucratically sound, was bad from a business point of view, only the following answer can be given: what country in the world had an institution better directed and better organized in a business sense than Germany’s state railways? It was reserved to the revolution to go on wrecking this exemplary apparatus until at last it seemed ripe for being taken out of the hands of the nation and socialized according to the lights of this Republic’s founders; in other words, made to serve international stock exchange capital, the power behind the German revolution.

What especially distinguished the German civil service and administrative apparatus was their independence from the individual governments whose passing political views could have no effect on the job of German civil servant. Since the revolution, it must be admitted, this has completely changed. Ability and competence were replaced by party ties and a selfreliant, independent character became more of a hindrance than a help.

The state form, the army. and the civil service formed the basis for the old Reich’s wonderful power and strength. These first and foremost were the reasons for a quality which is totally lacking in the present­day state: state’s authority! For this is not based on bull­sessions in parliaments or provincial diets, or on laws for its protection, or court sentences to frighten those who insolently deny it, etc., but on the general confidence which may and can be placed in the leadership and administration of a commonwealth. This confidence, in turn, results only from an unshakable inner faith in the selflessness and honesty of the government and administration of a country and from an agreement between the spirit of the laws and the general ethical view. For in the long run government systems are not maintained by the pressure of violence, but by faith in their soundness and in the. truthfulness with which they represent and advance the interests of a people.

Gravely as certain evils of the pre­War period corroded and threatened to undermine the inner strength of the nation, it must not be forgotten that other states suffered even more than Germany from most of these ailments and yet in the critical hour of danger did not nag and perish. But if we consider that the German weaknesses before the War were balanced by equally great strengths, the ultimate cause of the collapse can and must lie in a different field; and this is actually the case.

The deepest and ultimate reason for the decline of the old Reich lay in its failure to recognize the racial problem and its importance for the historical development of peoples. For events in the lives of peoples are not expressions of chance, but processes related to the self­preservation and propagation of the species and the race and subject to the laws of Nature, even if people are not conscious of the inner reason for their actions.