They do little more than bay at the
moon.
Impressive as Nippold's list seems at first, and dangerous to the peace of
the world, after all one's final thought is this: How few they are, and
how scant their influence, as compared with the wise, sane, commonsense of
sixty millions of German people. The two great papers that stand for peace
and sanity, the _Berliner Tageblatt_ and the _Frankfurter Zeitung_, with
the _Muenchener Neueste Nachrichten_, are read daily by more Germans than
all the reactionary sheets combined. The Socialist organ _Vorwaerts_,
avowedly opposed to monarchy as well as to militarism, carries farther
than all the organs of Pangermanism of whatever kind.
We may justly conclude that the war spirit is not the spirit of Germany, a
nation perforce military because the people cannot help themselves. So far
as it goes, it is the spirit of a narrow clique of "sleepless watchdogs"
whose influence is waning, and would be non-existent were it not for the
military organization which holds Germany by the throat, but which has
pushed the German people just as far as it dares.
A second lesson is that while forms of government, and social traditions,
may differ, the relation of public opinion towards war is practically the
same in all the countries of Western Europe.
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