'There is
no passion in the mind of man so weak, but it mates and masters the
fear of death; and therefore death is no such terrible enemy when a man
hath so many attendants about him that can win the combat of him.
Revenge triumphs over death; love slights it; honour aspireth to it;
grief flieth to it, fear pre-occupateth it; nay, we read, after Otho the
Emperor had slain himself, pity (which is the tenderest of affections)
provoked many to die out of mere compassion to their sovereign, and as
the truest sort of followers.' If this is true of the fear of death, how
much truer it is of the love of material gain. Any whim, or point of
pride, or fixed idea, or old habit, is enough to make a man or a nation
forgo the hope of profit and fight for a creed.
The German creed is by this time well known. Before the war we took
little notice of it. We sometimes saw it stated in print, but it seemed
to us too monstrous and inhuman to be the creed of a whole people. We
were wrong; it was the creed of a whole people. By the mesmerism of
State education, by the discipline of universal military service, by the
pride of the German people in their past victories, and by the fears
natural to a nation that finds enemies on all its fronts, an absolute
belief in the State, in war as the highest activity of the State, and in
the right of the State to enslave all its subjects, body and soul, to
its purposes, had become the creed of all those diverse peoples that are
united under the Prussian Monarchy.
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