"Thus, at the beginning of the present year, in spite of the withdrawal, since the Agadir affair, of very large amounts of French capital from the German market, Germany had attained to such a position that only the United States stood on a higher plane in regard to its future in the world of competitive commerce. And this great and increasing economic strength was, for war purposes, at the disposal of the Prussian militarists, if they succeeded in getting the upper hand in politics and foreign affairs."
FOOTNOTES:
[25] Works on the Thirty Years' War are numerous. Many scholarly and exhaustive treatises on various aspects of the subject are, as might be expected, to be found in German. For general popular reading Schiller's excellent piece of literary hack work (translated in Bonn's Library) may still be consulted, but perhaps the best short general history of the war with its entanglement of events is that by the late Professor S.R. Gardiner, of Oxford, which forms one of the volumes of Messrs. Longman, Green & Co.'s series entitled "Epochs of Modern History."
CHAPTER X[ToC]
MODERN GERMAN CULTURE
It is important to distinguish between the meaning of the German term "Kultur" and that commonly expressed in English by the word "culture." The word "Kultur" in modern German is simply equivalent to our word "civilization," whereas the word "culture" in English has a special meaning, to wit, that of intellectual attainments. In this chapter we are chiefly concerned with the latter sense of the word.