The world is in agony. We witness the most terrible catastrophe¹ known to mankind—most terrible, not from its huge size, but because it is a moral catastrophe. Through centuries of suffering and cruelty, guided by religion, we thought we had attained² to knowledge of and belief in a public right between nations, and an honorable warfare³, if warfare must be. This has been shattered to pieces. No need to investigate further the atrocities⁴ at Liège or Louvain. These and more have indeed been amply proved, but what need of proof after the Lusitania school festival? In that holiday we see the feast of Kultur, the Teutonic climax⁵. How came it to pass? Is it the same Germany who gave those two holidays to her school children? The opera in Frankfurt, and this orgy of barbaric blood-lust, guttural with the deep basses⁶ of the fathers and shrill⁷ with the trebles of their young? Their young, to whom they teach one day the gentle melodies of Lortzing, and to exult⁸ in world-assassination⁹ on another?  
Goethe said—and the words glow with new prophetic light: "Germans are of yesterday; ... a few centuries must still elapse before ... it will be said of them, 'It is long since they were barbarians¹⁰.'" And again: "National hatred¹¹ is a peculiar¹² thing. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of Kultur." But how came it to pass? Do the two holidays proceed from the same Kultur, the same Fatherland?
 
They do; and nothing in the whole story of mankind is more strange than the case of Germany—how Germany through generations has been carefully trained for this wild spring at the throat of Europe that she has made. The Servian assassination has nothing to do with it, save that i............