Countless examples can be given from speeches in the Reichstag and from leaders and newspapers of virtually all parties in Germany, showing this desire for conquest, showing that Germany will not be content to go back to the situation before the war. Even Maximilian Harden, who is respected all over the world because of his fearlessness and reason, has written since the war in favour of a greater Germany, thus:
"We wage the war from the rock of conviction that Germany after its deeds has a right to demand broader room on the earth and greater possibilities of action and these things we must attain."
Dr. Spahn, to-day the leader of the Centrum party, answering in December, 1915, Scheidemann, who had argued against annexation, and speaking in the name of 254 members of the Reichstag representing the citizens' parties said:
"We wait in complete union, with calm determination, and let me add, with trust in God, the hour which makes possible peace negotiations, in which forever the military, commercial, financial and political interests of Germany must, in all circumstances and by all means, be protected, including the widening of territories necessary to this end."
Ludendorff is now perhaps the man of most weight and influence, barring no one, in all Germany. When only Chief of Staff of the East Army he wrote: "The Power of Middle Europe will be strengthened, that of the Great Russians pushed back towards the East, from whence it came, at a time not very distant."
These quotations simply show that the great majority of Germans—those outside the social democratic party—of the Germans, indeed, who rule the country, conduct its commerce, and officer its army and navy—all have been infected with a dangerous microbe of Pan-Germanism and of world-conquest.
Every one who professes a knowledge of German life and character, every one who writes of the origin of the war, talks of Treitschke, Nietzsche and Bernhardi.
Nothing made the Germans angrier than to find in foreign newspapers that on this triumvirate was placed the burden of the responsibility for the war. And I agree with the complaining Germans. Bernhardi, who, during the war, was given a command behind the fighting front at Posen, was not considered a skilful general by the military or a great or even popular writer by the people.
How many people in our country or in France or in England are influenced by the lectures or writings of one college professor? And yet, according to many out of Germany, Treitschke, the deaf professor of Heidelberg, is the one man who transmuted the soul of Germany and incited the Empire to a cruel war.
In America you can find any brand of professor, from a professor in a Virginia College who recently boasted that he would not subscribe to American Liberty war bonds, but would send the money to the Socialist, pacifist candidate for Mayor of New York, to the Professor in the University of Chicago who based his claim to fame on the fact that he had never been kissed. What professor of history has had any great political influence beyond his own college?