For proof of this, nothing but their word of honor. Do they
take us for those young gentlemen who said to Monge, "Professor, give us
your word of honor that this theorem is true and we will excuse you from
the demonstration of it"?
Fully to explain the role of the intellectual savants and university men
in the formation of the ideology of caste which prevails among the
Germans it would be necessary to recite the history of instruction in
Germany, not such as Davis and Paulson have written it, but such as it
actually is under the influence of institutions and programmes--I mean
the moral history of instruction.
The great Frederick was wont to cry, "I commence by taking; afterward I
shall always have pedants enough to establish my rights." Pedants or
not, the members of the teaching corps of every grade in Germany are a
wheel of the State, their mission is to form not men, but Germans, to
inculcate the national idea. Their views have penetrated even to the
common people.
Germany receives a double education--that of the school and that of the
barracks. The spirit of these two institutions is the same, and their
influence, which has been exercised since 1848 in opposition to
humanitarian and internationalist ideas, has encountered no serious
obstacles, for it went readily with certain old instincts which it was
not difficult to reawaken and which general circumstances favored.
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